Land Where Time Stands Still

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TENSION ENVEXCIPG COUP,

JUL 2T. '50

D DD01 01S3S1S fl

LAND WHERE
TIME STANDS STILL

Other Boohs by

MAX MILLER

IT MUST BE THE CLIMATE

RENO

HARBOR OF THE SUN
A STRANGER CAME TO PORT

MEXICO AROUND ME

FOR THE SAKE OF SHADOWS

FOG AND MEN ON BERING SEA

THE GREAT TREK
THE MAN ON THE BARGE

THE SECOND HOUSE FROM THE CORNER

THE BEGINNING OF A MORTAL

HE WENT AWAY FOR A WHILE

I COVER THE WATERFRONT

COLLECTING PITAHAYA FRUIT

LAND WHERE
TIME STANDS STILL

By
MAX MILLER

Illustrated with photographs by
GEORGE LINDSAY

and
THE AUTHOR

DODD, MEAD & COMPANY
NEW YORK 1943

COPYRIGHT, 1943

BY MAX MILLER

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

NO PART OF THIS BOOK MAY BE REPRODUCED IN ANY FORM
WITHOUT PERMISSION IN WRITING FROM THE PUBLISHER

PRINTER IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
BY THE VAIL- BALLOT? PRKSS, INC., BINCXIAMTOK^ N. V*

FOREWORD

THIS book is the record o a trip overland In the fall of 1941
from San Diego to Cape San Lucas at the tip of Lower Cali-
fornia. It Is neither an adventure story nor a systematic
study of the little-known Mexican province. It is simply a
record of what I saw there, and such economic and socio-
logical statistics as it contains arise incidentally from the
story itself.

Lower California is the Mexican land which hangs like
an elephant's trunk below our own California. In this book
when I speak of Lower California I am, of course, referring
to the Mexican province. Southern California denotes the
area roughly a hundred miles north and south of Los An-
geles, and east to the Arizona line. And when I use the word
California alone, I am speaking of the entire state of Cali-
fornia, U. S. A. This is confusing, even to Westerners, and
it needs clearing up at the outset.

GREETINGS

MY DEAR MAX:

With reference to the anti-American feeling which was
so prominent and noticeable during your visit to Lower
California, the following data may be of interest to you:

At the time of your visit such feeling was especially pro-
nounced, owing to the activities of numerous German
agents who had been sent into the country to organize local
resident Germans. They combined to turn loose a continu-
ous series of publications, talks, and general barroom gossip
to promote an ill-feeling against the Americans, and you
happened to be in the muzzle of the gun at the time of your
trip.

Pearl Harbor solidified the Mexican idea against various
Axis powers just as much as it did that of the United States.
The Mexican government very promptly slapped in jail
all the German residents and nonresidents and all Japanese
of the same character they could get their hands on and they
were all safely under lock and key before even the United
States had made any such movement.

Left to themselves, the Mexican people responded in the
proper fashion and are just as an ti- Axis as we ourselves are
and are carrying on their activities with wholehearted co-
operation, both on the part of government officials, Army,
Navy and Air Force. In fact, their enthusiasm is admirable
and they cannot understand why we don't immediately
invade Japan and settle our score with that racial group.
They are very anxious to go along on the trip and do their
bit at finishing them off. You would be quite astonished
at the enthusiastic attitude of that region at present in
comparison to what you noted at the time of your visit.

With very best regards,

James Harding

Baja California, 1943

ILLUSTRATIONS
Collecting Pitahaya Fruit Frontispiece

PAGE

Mission San Borjas 20

Grand Old Man of San Borjas 28

Orchestra at San Borjas Mission ........ 28

Onyx Quarry at El Marmol 52

Jail at El Arco %

Shark Camp, Gulf of California 76

"Creeping Devil" Cactus 84

Valley of Comondu 108

Drying Dates at Comondu 1x6

The Naturalists at Work 116

Town of Magclalena on Magdalena Island 132

Bringing Water to La Paz 148

Reading from Top to Bottom, Max Miller and Friend . 148

Some of the Abandoned Pearl-Fishing Equipment at La Paz 1 64

Oxen Plowing at San Jose del Cabo 180

Turtle Fishermen at San Francisco Bay on the Gulf of Cali-
fornia 196

Bells of Loreto Mission, Oldest of the California Mission

Chain ' , - *

Part of the National Highway

Max Miller and the Young Mathematical Genius . . , 228

Cabo San Lucas, the Very Tip of the Peninsula . . . .234

LAND WHERE
TIME STANDS STILL

CHAPTER i

Ax THE time of the great Jesuit activity in Lower Cali-
fornia, in the eighteenth century, this arid, bitter land was
perhaps better known to the informed people of the world
than ever before or since.

To the north lay a shadowy land," our present California.
The two are similar in topography and not unlike in cli-
mate; but by the vagaries of history the California harbors
were intensively developed while those of Lower Califor-
nia, quite as good, are still surrounded by their chaparral
jungles, even less used than in the days of the whalers.
Thousands of sportsmen and vacationers swann annually
over the mountains and deserts of California; the peaks and
wastes of Lower California are for the most part known
only to coyotes and rattlesnakes, or at best to a lone peon
ranch family. The primitive roads of California have be-
come wide motor highways; in Lower California, except
for a few hundred miles of pavement near the border, the
"roads" are much as they were in the days of the padres,
sketchy tracks along barrancas and across deserts, and
mountain trails of almost Andean difficulty.

Progress is a debatable subject; but certainly material
progress has come slowly and in small measure to Lower
California. The contrast between its primitiveness and the
glittering man-made works of California is sudden and
sharp. One is thrown far into the past. At first it made me
think of an old film of the silent-movie days in which the

2 THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL

harder the cameraman grinds the harder the wheels o a
vehicle spin backward.

It is true that the Mexican province of Lower California
is important in our defense of the West Coast, but I cannot
honestly say that I wanted to make a journey down the full
length of the mysterious peninsula because I felt a war was
coming on.

War or no war, I have always wanted to make the trip
overland. There are no improved roads, no regular trans-
portation; and most of us who live on the border have had
to be content with staring across at the rusty hills which
mark the beginning of the peninsula's interior. Day after
day, year after year we have stared; but we know very little
about what lies beyond.

The coast of Lower California is much more familiar
than the interior country to us of the border. This has come
about naturally through contact with the fish boats, par-
ticularly the tuna-clipper fleet, which operate out of San
Diego. Their crews have talked sp much about the harbors,
the inlets, the islands, that the names are well known to us.
Many of us have voyaged down the coast on these fishing
boats, just for the fun of it. I made my first such cruise
twenty years ago. These cruises gave us little feeling of
Lower California itself. We were merely looking in from
the outside. This was disappointing, and I kept wanting to
make the journey overland.

With the war clouds gathering, we were lucky to get away
when we did. A month earlier, we wouldn't have seen such
little evidences as we did of the coming struggle. A month
later, we couldn't have gone at all.

We were making the trip in the high-chassis field truck

THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL g

of the San Diego Natural History Museum. The veteran
naturalist, Lawrence Huey, had made admirable prepara-
tions. In addition to traps, guns, and so on, the four-geared
truck carried enough food for three months, and a special
tank of drinking water. We would need it. We were lucky
enough to discover a leak in an auxiliary gas tank within
an hour before our start. If it had happened a few days
later, after we were deep on the wilderness road, there
would have been nothing for it but a humiliating return
for repairs.

We started without fanfare. I have always wanted an
excuse to depart in a pith helmet, but I slunk away bare-
headed. Instead of boots I wore basketball shoes.

The Museum's two naturalists, Lawrence Huey and
Frank Gander, were making a trip to collect specimens of
flora and fauna. And I was going to see the Interior of
Lower California and report on it. I was the angel. We
needed each other. The enclosed truck, specially equipped
for such undertakings, could not operate without money
and provisions; and the truck was necessary to me if I was
to get to the southern end of the peninsula.

The general route to be followed, the old Camino Real
of the padres, should be marked at the outset, "For Burros
Only." At first this may strike the traveler as an exaggera-
tion. Certainly he gets off to a heigh-ho start on the paved
highway leading from the border town of Tijuana down
the sixty miles or so to Ensenada. Even after leaving En-
senada, southward, he may think, too, for an hour what a
lark all this is. Why do people tell tales about the impos-
sible roads of Lower California? This road is dirt, certainly;
but it's graded.

4 THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL

Yes, It's graded for two or three hours. Then suddenly
the primitive leaps out of nowhere and strikes the car with
the heavy jest of a big sea. Over goes the crockery. From
there on it's every man for himself, holding tight to what-
ever he can find. A veteran of bad roads had advised me to
wear a money belt. He said It would keep me from being
shaken apart. Dutifully I wore one for a couple of days, but
the chafing was worse than the remedy. It was better just
to hold on and cry silently, "Why? Why am I letting myself
in for this?"

A week later, arriving at San Borjas, I felt repaid for the
ordeal of jolts, cactus, rocks, heat, and dust. San Borjas is
an isolated mountain Mission where time has stood still for
a century or more. We hadn't planned it it is useless to
plan anything in Lower California but we arrived, fortu-
nately, as the annual fiesta began.

Life at San Borjas today is much as it was In California
in precolonial days, and it was there I first encountered
the spirit of Lower California. A hundred natives, more or
less, arrived burro-back out of nowhere, to stay for six days.
They got nicely drunk on warm beer and warmer tequila,
and they danced on an earthen floor for six days and nights.
Between dances they worshiped in the ancient Mission.
There was no priest. None could come.

The people, assembled from their mountain arroyos,
were on their own. The festival o San Borjas, a holiday in
commemoration of San Borja, was the big event o their
year. If only a priest had managed to come (he had come
sometimes before), the year's crop o babies would have
been christened, and some of the parents themselves would

THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL 5

have gotten married. But everything was all right as it was.
There was fresh meat to go around.

A bull had been killed, drawn, and divided. Its head lay
beside the mission in the sun, and the flies seemed to be
having as good a time as the people.

Eight men squatted over a blanket a few yards from the
head of the court, gambling earnestly. Another group was
gambling on a blanket by the side entrance to the Mission.

I saw a boy of about seven playing a cello. The instru-
ment was bigger than he. He was barefoot and wore over-
alls. To reach its keys he would first lay the instrument on
the ground and then walk over to the tuning end. When
finally he had the instrument tuned and ready, he squeezed
both himself and the huge implement into the orchestra.
And the other players, without missing a beat, made room
for him. He was needed, and nobody smiled at his size. He
really could play. He played very seriously, like a man.

The Mission of San Borjas is not one of the oldest mis-
sions in Lower California, but it is old enough. It was
founded in 1762 and was not quite finished when the
Jesuit builders, without warning, were herded out of Lower
California on orders of the halfwit King Charles III of
Spain. Any Jesuit, said Charles, no matter how ill or distant,
who did not leave Lower California within two days, would
be executed. And any person who helped a Jesuit would be
executed too.

But the Mission of San Borjas lives on. Once each year,
during the Festival, the Mission comes to life, just as in the
old days, and the bells ring. They ring too loudly, scaring
the birds and scattering the burros. They startled me, too,

6 THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL

the first afternoon when the belfry broke Into a cannonade.
I thought some drunks had climbed up there to have a good
time.

I was wrong about a lot of my first impressions of these
wilderness people who had congregated at San Borjas. We
of the truck were the intruders. We had not been invited,
we had not been expected; we had dropped unannounced
into the heart of their sacred revelry. We were there when
they prayed, we were there when they besought the blue-
gowned replica of Saint Borja for mercy; and we were there
when, this mercy granted, they went and sinned some more.
They sinned as long as there was tequila left to sin with, as
long as there were coins to drop onto the gambling blankets,
and repentant candles to place once more on the stone altar.

One night I counted fifty-two candles on the altar. Two
others had already burned out. Bats whirled around the
walls undisturbed by the candles, or the orchestra which
played during worship, or by the hats which the boys
periodically threw at them. After all, the bats had reason
to believe they owned this place. They certainly owned it
for fifty-one weeks of the year, anyhow.

In this annual Festival of San Borjas I was watching no
make-believe replica of the days which used to be in our
own California, It was no imitation pageant, no come-on
stunt to attract visitors. This festival was old-elays-in-
California, all right, but it was not play-acting.

Only one person there, a trader, could speak English, a
Turkish peddler known as El Turco. At one time he had
lived in Tijuana. I didn't like him. He was too smart. At
first he didn't like me. He was afraid that I might be a

THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL 7

trader too, a rival. Why else would I be there with an en-
closed truck? I might have better holy medallions, safety-
pins, or green sateen to offer than he. At first he had whis-
pered to the people in Spanish to have little to do with me.
He told them he had known me a long time, that I had a
bad reputation.

My mistakes were many before I made my first friend. All
I could do was stand around unnoticed on the outskirts
of the dance, feeling very much like a body-odor advertise-
ment. I tried several ways of ingratiating myself but failed.

In our land we hire our dance-orchestras, and we tip
them occasionally between dances. So here, after I had
listened to the music awhile, I handed two silver pesos to
the musician who appeared to be the leader. He handed
those two pesos right back to me, then started a new piece.
I don't know how many people saw the quick transaction;
I suppose they all did.

I hadn't known that nearly all of these hill people could
play an instrument of some sort. There aren't many ex-
ceptions. Even the youngsters tapped out rhythms. In the
lonely hills of an evening, music was the dependable enter-
tainment of the distant families.

So here at San Borjas as many orchestras could be organ-
ized as there were instruments to be relayed around. This
explained how they were able to maintain an orchestra in
the Mission as well as the dance orchestra in front of the
hut. And how the music could be kept going night and
day.

Those two pesos were now back in my hand, burning a
little, I was painfully aware of them. If I had offered them

8 THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL

to a child, say to the youngster playing the cello, this
would have been considered perfectly all right by their
elders.

It turned out that my first friend was a young man whom
I had seen holding a very small baby. The young man
finally asked me if we had anything in the truck with which
to make a cast for the baby's foot.

"The ankle acts like it's broken/' he explained in Span-
ish. "It's always acted like it's broken."

I looked at the little foot, then felt it. It appeared neither
bruised nor swollen.

"It doesn't look broken to me," I said.

"But look what it does." He moved the foot any direc-
tion he pleased. It was limp as a rag. "There's no strength
to it. The baby'll never be able to walk not if the foot
keeps on this way. The other foot don't act like that. I
think maybe it's broken,"

"No," I answered, "I'm sure it's not broken." But ac-
tually I wasn't sure of anything. I thought of rickets and
all the other baby ailments I'd heard of.

The mother left the dance to come over and nurse the
child. She was not more than nineteen, slender and pretty.
She pulled down her waist and nursed the child while the
husband and I stood there talking.

"You really don't think it's broken?" the husband re-
peated anxiously.

"My, no, I don't think it's broken/' I said it to botli of
them, the young father and the young mother. "But if I
were you, I'd let a doctor look at it."

"A doctor?" They lifted their faces in surprise. "A doc-
tor?"

THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL Q

"Sure, a doctor/ 5 I said. "He could just take one look at
the foot and tell you all about it."

"But a doctor, sir "

I remembered we were in the wilderness. I didn't know
where the nearest doctor would be. At Santa Rosalia, no
doubt. A week away.

"Here's what well do," I added quickly. "You can't go
to Santa Rosalia. That's sure."

"No, sir. We can't go to Santa Rosalia. We can't leave
the farm that long."

"No, you can't go to Santa Rosalia. So here's what I'll
do" I kept thinking of rickets "you bend the ankle all
around as you did before, and I'll take some close-up
photographs of it. I'll show them to the next doctor I see
and tell him how it acts. Then I'll ask him to send you a
letter about what to do/'

"Would you?" The mother looked up from her nursing.
"Would you?"

"Certainly."

"And we'll have our aunt read the letter to us," the
mother said. "She's good at reading."

"But the letter will take a long time to reach you," I
warned. "Don't get impatient and think I've forgotten."

"Well not, sir," the young father said. "Besides, the
baby might already be getting better."

"Why?" I asked, taking hope. "What makes you think
that?"

"Because we're here at San Borjas," he answered simply.

"Yes, but what difference does that make?"

"But don't you see, sir? We're here at San Borjas, and
we've already shown the baby's foot to the Saint."

CHAPTER 2

IN SAN BORJAS lived Fidel Villavecencio, grand old veteran
of Lower California, and his family. I had been told that
his and one other were the only families who stayed at
San Borjas the year round. I wanted to see him for two
reasons, both of them selfish: he knows all there is to
know about his section of Lower California for the past
eighty years, and he speaks good English. He was nearing
his ninetieth birthday, so when I didn't see him in the
Mission yard with the others, I assumed that he had died.
But when I asked about him, the answers were evasive.
Gradually I discovered that poor old Fidel was on the
wrong side of the social fence. He disapproved of all this
tequila-drinking and boom-booming of dance music day
and night. His wife had died not long ago.

"But where is he?" I insisted. "Where is he now?"

I was guided through the entrance of a crumbling adobe
wall to a kind of annex to the Mission. Fidel and his chil-
dren and grandchildren were living in a row of abandoned
Mission rooms.

I soon discovered that he needed me as much as 1 needed
him or at least he needed my tobacco. 1 grinned, turn-
ing over the tobacco, and asked:

"But where were you? Why didn't you come outside?
That's no way to behave/'

He grinned back. "Couldn't/* he said cheerfully, "It's
these legs. Can't make 'em move. Rheumatism/'

THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL II

This was the man whose agility had saved the life of
more than one man. First he had been a mining engineer.
Then he had a little farm, then a smaller farm. And now

He had to keep busy stilL A prisoner to his rheumatism,
he sat all day at his bench pounding out shoes for his family.
Once he had been amazingly wealthy, and then amazingly
poor. Finally he had been rich again, but now he was so
poor he wouldn't even talk about it. All he wanted of life
now was quiet, and he had picked a good spot for it, among
the ruins of San Borjas. A good spot, that is, except when
the mountaineers descended upon him for festival once a
year.

"I suppose you want to know the history of the Mission,"
he said, opening a hand- written booklet.

"Nope. I just want to talk to you."

"Well, you're the first American who's never wanted to
know the history of a Mission. And look, I've got it all
written out. George Lindsay wrote me long ago you were
coming. And so I thought you'd want to know the history
of the Mission."

The hand-written notes were all in a little booklet that
he himself had sewn together from paper-scraps. The card-
board cover bore the advertisement of a beautiful girl
brushing her teeth. The message read: NO BRISTLE
TROUBLE EITHER.

"It's got all the dates/* he said. "Ill read them to you."

"But how about me sort of looking around first?"

"Sure. Oh, sure. But here are the dates when you want
them."

Meanwhile, as we talked, the rocky hills echoed back the
perpetual boom-boom-boom of the orchestra. It was almost

12 THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL

as if other little orchestras were playing up inside the hills,
too, in competition,

"I hope all this ends pretty soon/' the old man sighed.
The dirt floors o his quarters and kitchen no longer be-
longed to him or his family. Actually, they did not belong
to him anyway. They were part of the Mission. But if there
is such a thing as squatter's rights, the poor Seflor was
justified. At least in his own eyes he was, for it was he who
guarded the Mission and cared for its sacred trappings dur-
ing those long lonely sieges of the year when nobody else
was around.

But during the Festival, the Mission, being public prop-
erty, was so completely open that everybody tramped
through whatever rooms they pleased and borrowed what-
ever they wanted of Senor Fidel's personal belongings. He
tried to smile, but it was difficult. He tried to be good-
natured about it, but he was always too well aware that a
lot of the borrowed pans and kettles would not be re-
turned. He had no legal right to make objection, and the
others knew it. But I think they felt that he would object
if he could, and a silent feud was on,

Not being aware at first of the situation, 1 undiplo-
matically declared myself too openly on the side of the old
man. The rival* headquarters was the hut of the other
family who stayed all year at San Borjas. They lived across
the Mission yard, not in the Mission itself, and they wel-
comed the great excitement. This hut, indeed, held a six-
day open house.

The dancing took place on the dirt floor in front of the
hut, but this did not prevent the drunks from wandering
or even sleeping wherever they pleased.

THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL lg

Though Fidel Villavecencio was the man I liked, the six-
day rounders down from the hills were the people I wanted
to know better. But to them, as I say, I was the uninvited
guest, in league, perhaps, with the gray-haired old Don who
wanted oh, how he wanted silence.

We all got together finally the Don and everybody. But
it took time, and it seemed far more important to me at
the moment than Seiior Fidel's hand-written dates within
their no-bristle-trouble-either cover.

A naked youngster, her hair uncombed, kept strolling
around the kitchen as we talked, and poking her fingers
into the cooking.

"Who does she belong to?" I asked.

"I don't know," the old Don sighed again. "Goodness, I
don't know/'

It is a Southern California belief that no Mexican party
is really good unless two or three of the guests die. If this is
so on the mainland, where there are courts and schools and
ambulances, surely I can be forgiven for expecting lurid
events in San Borjas, beyond reach of jail or doctor.

Among the dancers was a skinny, sharp-eyed woman about
sixty years old. She drank her tequila with the men, talked
out of the side of her mouth with a cigarette dangling
from her lips, and carried a gun.

"Ah/' I thought. "Here's the one to watch. Here's where
it'll begin." I did not actually see her gun. She kept it
fastened under her long black dress, below her hip. But she
was proud of the bulge it made. She seemed prouder still
when men reached out and patted the bulge as she walked
by them between dances. She would brush their hands

14 THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL

aside, grin at them. Her grin was marred by her lack of
teeth.

"Does she always carry a gun?" I asked.

"No, not always."

"Why's she carrying it now, then?"

"She might tell you if you asked her."

I didn't much want to ask, since it was none of my busi-
ness. Nor did I care to make it my business, for I was still
on probation at the festival, tolerated but not fully ac-
cepted.

My open companionship with Sefior Fidel, who opposed
all this drinking and noise, was of course one of the reasons.
I had asked him if it would be all right for me to cross the
Mission yard and go to the dance.

"Certainly, if you really want to," he had said. "But I'm
not running the dance. I have nothing to do with it; and
none of my family is there, either."

This should have told me enough. I think he was really
hurt when I left him and crossed the Mission yard toward
the hut with the music. And as I drew near the merry-
makers nobody rushed out to greet me or to fling a beauti-
ful partner into my arms.

I am more than a little familiar, of course, with the
stories that returning Americans tell of their great social
success in Mexican villages; how they soon enough had
things their own way. This may be all right for them, but
perhaps it is not so good for the Americans who come after
them. We are not always as popular there as we may think.
Mexicans may smile politely and give way to our demands;
but this is no indication what they are actually thinking
or saying among themselves.

THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL 15

The Mexican families assembled at San Borjas owed
me nothing. I was just as much a gate-crasher at their party
as a Mexican family would be if it moved uninvited into a
party at my home. My sun-bleached hair, minus a hat,
made me seem freakish in a group where everyone was
wearing straw hats even while dancing. There is a great
difference between being a freak and an accepted member
of the gang. But I wanted very much to be accepted.

The peddler, whom I didn't like, stayed close to me, and
his English was better than my Spanish. He is the one who
had first spoken to us when our truck had rolled into the
Mission grounds. When I took out my little camera to
shoot the group that crowded in front of the Mission to
stare at us, the peddler had demanded: "Hey, you, what
are you photographing?"

"The group in front of the Mission/' I answered, and
clicked the camera.

"Well, that's all right," he had said. "Okay."

So, at first, I had supposed him to be an authority in
charge of the festival. Somebody had to be in charge, I
thought. But, as in the case of the music later, I was em-
barrassingly wrong. Nobody was in charge of this festival;
no committees nor policemen. Everybody looked out for
everybody else. When a father or a brother or a cousin be-
came so drunk he no longer could stand upright, he was
not upbraided. He was courteously allowed to lie where
he dropped. A coat was chucked under his head for a
pillow. Or he was dragged to a spot out of the sun.

As time passed, I became aware that the various families
gathered at San Borjas were as united as a clan. Each family
knew what it means to make a living from the desert moun-

i6 THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL

tains. Though they were separated most of the year by as
much as eighty miles perhaps seeing very little of each
other during the year when they assembled here on the
grounds of San Borjas for their six-day tequila break-up
they behaved as a unit. A vigilance committee would have
been an absurdity here.

But, to repeat, at first I had not known this.

I had asked the peddler outright, I remember, if he was
in charge. He answered in English: "Don't I look like I
am? So what've you got in your truck?"

"Stuffed rats/' I answered. "And stuffed mice. Some
rattlesnakes in alcohol, too."

"No market here for them," he said. "You can stay."

On our side of the border the question that baffles me is
the familiar one: "Tell me, now, do you like Mexicans?"
There is no answer to it, of course. There are Mexicans and
Mexicans, just as there are Americans and Americans. 1
dislike those city-smart Mexicans who are merely trans-
planted peons. They have lost their natural dignity and
judgment in contact with the tawdry border. They have
been around just enough to learn tricks but not around
enough to acquire judgment My favorite Mexicans are
the genuinely cultured ones and the outright peons. I can
get along well with either sort. But the sraarty ones those
who pretend to be more American than Mexican are the
ones who annoy me. The peddler belonged to this class,

Three days later, 1 remember, he tried to pass off at a
merciless price some dubious medicine to the parents of
the crippled baby. The medicine, he told the parents,
would cure the baby. But by that time, feeling more certain

THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL 17

of my standing in the society of San Borjas, I helped per-
suade the parents not to make the purchase. The medicine
smelled dangerous. Yet the fact that it had such a strong
evil odor was its most attractive virtue to these people. Per-
haps I should not have interfered. I don't know. But the
peddler and I all along had been holding a secret little
contest. And by this time he was one up on me.

He had scored beautifully during my first visit to the
dance, with those two rejected pesos still burning in my
hand. Not knowing just what to do with them, but know-
ing I had to do something, I tried to make amends by
turning the two pesos over to the peddler. I had noticed
that he had two boxes of apples to sell. I asked him in Eng-
lish to use the money for apples for two youngsters squat-
ting on the ground close by.

My offer brought instant action from the peddler. He
turned his back on me and broke into fast, excited Span-
ish. Waving his arms he summoned everybody within
range of his voice to come and have apples. The American
was paying for them. He told them to go round up every-
body else, babies, children, mothers, brothers. There was
nothing I could do about it. He had me. When the two
boxes of apples gave out he broke open boxes of candy.
Yes, yes, the American was paying for everything. The
peddler's hands, in dishing out the stuff, worked like
shuttles. Within two minutes or so it was all over. Every-
one had something, whether he wanted it or not, and the
peddler turned to me: "Forty pesos, please."

With all eyes on me I opened my money-belt and paid
promptly. To have protested would have cost me whatever

l8 THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL

advantage remained from the encounter, the people's
thanks. And well did the peddler know it. The first score
to him.

O course it's all quite laughable now. But out there in
the wilderness, and with only a limited amount of money
on me to see the scientific expedition through to Cape San
Lucas and back, it wasn't so funny.

Yet this is what the peddler's trick did do. A Mexican
came over to me then and said: "Would you like to join
our dance, man? Do you like to dance?"

So, after all, I guess there is something to be said for
apples.

CHAPTER 3

THE ERA of the Mission as a dominant force in our Califor-
nia is long since past, buried under a century and a half of
material development and several million new residents,
predominantly non-Catholic. It is possible to live for many
months in California, in a fair degree of comfort and intel-
ligence, without a passing thought for the missions.

Not so in Lower California. Here the missions, though
their buildings are crumbling, are very definitely a part of
the present. The names of the missions themselves are
practically the only place names on a map of the trail for
the entire length of the peninsula. Such villages as exist
have grown up at their feet; and they come repeatedly into
the conversation of the road. "Yes, that's the cave where
the padres lived while they built the mission.'* Or: "No,
you can't get off on a wrong road. There is no other road.
You keep going as you are until you come to the old mission;
then the road swings to the right/'

Some of the missions are intact and are in use; some
have disappeared and linger on only as place names. But
wherever you find a settlement in Lower California, it is
safe to say there is or once was a mission. Unlike most of the
pioneer development in the United States, in which fron-
tiersmen went ahead and the churches followed, in Lower
California the missions came first and the settlers afterward.

In our California the missions were built by one order
of priests, the Franciscans, In Lower California the build-

SO THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL

ing of missions was done under three regimes, the Jesuits,
the Franciscans, and the Dominicans. The Mission at San
Borjas was erected by the Jesuits in 1762. There is a legend
that this Mission was erected as a memorial to San Francisco
Borja, through a grant of "sixty thousand scudi" from Mariaj,
a grand duchess of the celebrated Borgia family, who wished
thus to honor her sainted relative. The word Borja is the
Spanish equivalent of the Italian Borgia. Nowadays the
Mexicans use the plural form, San Borjas, a trick of speech
to include not only the Mission itself but the surrounding
hills and arroyos.

One of the Duchess' stipulations with the grant, it is
said, was that the Mission was to be built in a desolate
locality. The Jesuits, who had already constructed a dozen
or more missions in Lower California, had no trouble at
all finding such a spot.

The site of San Boijas is remote from both the Gulf of
California and the Pacific Ocean, deep in the lion-infested
mountains. It is supposed that it was chosen because there
existed an ancient spring of sulphur water, which still rims.
The mountain Indians referred to the locality as Adac
not that it matters much today. But the fact that the area
of the sulphur spring had a name at all is evidence that
generations of Indians had crowded into the little pool for
baths long before my turn came, with soap, towel, and a fine
disregard of dragonflies.

Be that as it may, the Mission of San Borjas was erected
by the Jesuits under the leadership of a Bohemian priest
named Wiucesloa Link, It was, of course, built of adobe.
The present Mission church is of stone. But many of the
old adobe walls of Wincesloa Link are still standing, with-

THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL 21

out roofs. At the time of my visit these walls were being
used by some of the fiesta families as shelter for their camps
and livestock. Strips of meat drying in the sun dangled from
lines strung between the walls; and children played hide-
and-go-seek among them.

The graveyard of the old Jesuits was not far away, and
a camp was pitched there too. It contained, along with the
weathered headstones, two oval sepulchers. I could not read
the faded wordings, most of them in Latin. A bull, belong-
ing to the hill-people, tagged me wherever I went from
stone to stone, and interfered with any attempt at concen-
tration.

The bull's flanks dripped with cacti bulbs. They dangled
from his hide like strings of bells. Another bunch dangled
from his muzzle, swaying back and forth at each step. But
the bull did not seem to mind any of this. They felt no
worse than the banderillas of the bull-ring, I suppose, and
at least were not so gaudy. Once I had asked if the farmers
ever did anything about removing these cacti bulbs from
the grazing stock, and the answer was: "But, sir, they re-
move them themselves." I still don't know quite how or
when, although I have seen cows deliberately, though some-
what cautiously, munching into the spines of cholla to get
at the pulp.

The grazing rights of the cemetery seemed to belong to
the bull with the cacti, and he insisted on escorting me
with too close a friendliness, so I left him there and re-
turned to the adobe walls of Wincesloa Link.

This Mission was one of the last of Link's works before
he received the surprise command of eviction from the
King of Spain; the one wherein "on pain of death" the only

22 THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL

belongings the Jesuits were allowed to take away with them
were "three books/' one of devotions, one of theology, and
one of history. This despite the eighty years the Jesuits had
worked in Lower California.

This same swift order is largely responsible for the
rumors today that there are treasures buried in the old
Jesuit missions of Lower California. The bewildered
Jesuits, hardly believing the order and hoping it might
be canceled, are said to have buried sacred paraphernalia
and other valuables for safekeeping until the return.

It is true that fortune-hunters, by digging and by tear-
ing into walls, actually have found some money and buried
trinkets around these old missions. And treasure, so called,
has been unearthed around some of the later, Dominican
Missions.

San Borjas itself bore evidence of this treasure-hunting.
The Mission grounds were pockmarked, as was the road
that led to it. We had to drive the truck around some of the
holes. On seeing these cavities my first thought was that
somebody at some time had been trying desperately to find
water. Characteristically, nobody had bothered to cover the
holes or mark them. The grounds around San Borjas are
no place to go strolling at night without a flashlight.

When I asked Seiior Fidel if anybody had found any
money with all this digging, he answered simply: "Yes. But
not on the grounds here. It was up the canyon a bit. The
hole is still up there. 1 '

He added, though, that the older natives were supersti-
tious about it all. At nights, he said, strange lights from
time to time glisten from the hillsides.

"I've seen these lights myself, and I've also investigated

THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL 23

them. But I don't bother telling the natives what I found.
For the sake of the Mission it's better not to. Once I found
a leaky oil-can which had been thrown away and was catch-
ing the reflection of the moon. And another time I found
a beer-bottle. The lights are from things like that, gleam-
ing from the cactus. And the stars are bright here too, you
know. They can cause reflections from mineral rocks on
moonless nights."

Yes, ''buried treasures" have been found in Lower Cali-
fornia. But the "treasures" usually turn out to be nothing
much. The hunters could have earned as much at a regu-
lar job.

That "on pain of death" order from the Spanish King
is partly responsible for the biggest treasure fable of all, the
one about the Lost Mission in Lower California, which no-
body can find today. The stories about it resemble our own
tales of lost gold mines. But the rumor's main importance
to us of today, perhaps, is the way it symbolizes the ever-
changing confusion of mission-control. I have friends who
have searched for the Lost Mission of Lower California.
Some were serious about it, but others used it merely as
an excuse, I imagine, or as a ' 'purpose** for having a good
time riding mule-back through the northern mountains of
the peninsula.

After the Jesuits were kicked out so hastily, forced to
leave their belongings, the Franciscans and the Dominicans
moved in almost side by side. In their rivalry there isn't
much to indicate that they got along very well together.

The Franciscans were not exactly in love with Lower
California, anyhow, and moved into the new field of souls
in Upper California, But before leaving for the unexplored

24 THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL

region they did found one mission, San Fernando Villa-
catta. This one was all. After that the Franciscans allowed
the Dominicans to take over the whole works down south.
The agreement, apparently, worked out well for both sides.
The Dominicans would stay on their side of the fence and
work Lower California, while the Franciscans retained the
full option on the Indian souls of what today is our State of
California. At that time, of course, there was no border.
It was just a continual wilderness, owned by Spain.

In fairness to the Dominicans in Lower California it
must be said that during their first years they showed al-
most as much zeal as the earlier Jesuits. The Dominicans
founded seven more missions, to add to the fifteen already
built, and had started to build another, so the rumor goes,
when the Secularization Act of 1855 P ut an en d to a ll m is-
sion authority. This left the Dominicans of Lower Califor-
nia sitting on the same limb from which the Jesuits had
tumbled previously.

The new mission which the Dominicans are supposed to
have started to build is now the Lost Mission. Angered by
their dismissal, the story goes, the Dominicans would tell
nobody of its location, would only hint at the rich belong-
ings already accumulated there. The Dominicans, obeying
official orders, simply walked away in a huff and left every-
thing concealed somewhere in the jungle. There are sup-
posed to be pearls and much gold and silver for sacred
decorations, and a considerable amount of the famous old
Pious Fund, which was intended for building expenses,
buried within the unfinished walls, or in some cave near
them which only the Indians knew about.

What is more, the mission already had a name, it is said

THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL 25

although the name may be Santa Ysabel or Santa Clara,
depending on whether the Lost Mission is being hunted in
the northern regions or in the midland jungles. Or some-
where off San Borjas.

There are indications that the building of a new mission
was far from the thoughts of the later-day Dominicans in
Lower California. They were having a tough time with the
missions already "built, and they were running out of In-
dians, The aborigines were not helping matters at all by
dying off much faster than neophytes were born to fill the
missions already in operation. Times were bad and getting
worse. And, with not much to do, some of the old boys
among the Dominicans drifted too far to the worldly side.
Even the Superior of the Missions, for instance, was ex-
pelled for seeing more virtue in collecting pearls than souls.
And the padre of the most holy Loreto was dismissed, fol-
lowing complaints that he preferred both pearls and
women.

The sturdy Jesuits might have gone the same way if they
had lasted in Lower California. I don't know. The whole
country is a tricky place today for trying man's will power.
The hills around these old missions are as lonely as they
ever were, and communication between them is just as
difficult and uncertain. After a time any woman, in that
silent loneliness, begins to look pretty good. And any big
pearl, if suddenly found on the beach, would no doubt look
even better.

CHAPTER 4

IF I seem to be spending a disproportionate amount of
time on San Borjas, it is deliberate. Here, a third of the way
down the peninsula, was the opportunity I had hoped to
find to know the people of Lower California's midland.

Besides, I hadn't had my bath in the sulphur pool. I
didn't want to leave until I could wash off the desert grime.
The delay was hardly my fault; there was no room in the
pool. The hundred campers were using it too. Since they
had waited a year for the opportunity, they now made the
most of it, every minute of the day. The sulphur pool was
a sort of headquarters for gossip and clothes-washing and
the scrubbing down of children.

In addition to the sulphur pool there is a little spring of
drinking water at San Borjas. The two springs, within two
minutes* walk of each other, stayed so roiled with family
washings, babies, soapsuds, oil cans being dipped, and large
mothers trying to bathe in ankle-deep water while modestly
wearing one-piece dresses that any attempt of mine to
crowd in too would not have made me popular. As an un-
invited guest at the festival, I was still on probation and
unbathed.

But San Borjas, isolated from the main road, was satis-
fying so many of my old curiosities about the Lower Cali-
fornia back country that I stayed right there, letting the
answers come to me instead of going out for them. It was
a lazy method* of course, albeit a satisfactory one as long

THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL 27

as the fiesta lasted. There was no need to move southward
yet.

Always I've wanted to be able to say that I was the first
American ever to have entered a place, and that silly little
honor has always been denied me. Through the years there
have been other Americans at the Mission of San Borjas.
But so far as I know and this with reservations our party
was the first one to visit the place during festival week. It
was strictly coincidental. If we had planned it we might
have failed. Definite plans are the last item to carry in your
baggage in Lower California. A surprise rain can hold up a
car for a week, a month. A broken axle can leave you there
forever. And a bad case of diarrhea can cancel a trip before
it's fairly started. Lower California is supposed to be gener-
ally healthy, especially the northern part. But the land is
full of tricks; an unfamiliar plant can be one of the worst.
The natives know, naturally, which branches are poisonous,
which are useful. They have to know; the desert thickets
are their handy storehouse for so many family necessities.
But an outsider can make an awful mess of himself, say by
grabbing hold of branches indiscriminately while gather-
ing firewood. The sap may be more dangerous than the
thorns.

I know of one scientific expedition which had started out
in Lower California to collect insects but was knocked out
in short order by that old grizzly clown, diarrhea. The cause
of the attack, though, was odd. The members of the expedi-
tion had surrounded some moths inside a big clump of
brush, and to a man they climbed into the brush to collect
the specimens. The day was hot, and the collectors must
have panted a lot while working, for their mouths became

28 THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL

full of the stuff from the brush. They got the moths, but
they also got the other thing, and that was the end of the
expedition.

A botanist friend, George Lindsay, had made the trip to
San Borjas by burro from Punta Prieta a couple of years
ahead of us. He said, "You'll likely find it the most un-
touched mission locality down there," and illustrated this
with an incident. One morning he had seen a Mexican
youngster shivering either from cold or sickness. Lindsay
couldn't determine which; but he took off his jacket and
put it on the boy. The jacket had a zipper. The boy, never
having seen a zipper, assumed that he was now a prisoner
in the jacket for life. He ran away bellowing in search of a
knife to release himself.

Yet such a difference is made when even a haphazard
road supplants a burro trail, that the intervening two
years between Lindsay's visit and mine, has already had its
effect on San Borjas. No youngster there today would run
from a zipper. The sketchy road has already brought in the
peddler with his holy medallions and apples and zipper
jackets, too, no doubt.

The stone Mission of San Borjas is not yet quite finished.
Started in 1792, it probably never will be finished. Yet,
because of its remoteness, the Mission has been preserved
in working condition while more famous missions long
ago have had their guts torn out and their stones stolen.
The bells of San Borjas are the original bells, too even
though bell-stealing was once a popular pastime of vandals
on the peninsula. The bells are not quite as old as the
Mission. I examined them and they bear the date 1798.

From reading stories in my younger days about early

GRAND OLD MAN OF SAN BORJAS
SENOR FIDEL

ORCHESTRA AT SAN BORJAS MISSION

THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL 2Q

California missions, my impression of a mission bell was
that it tolled at eventide; it wafted a sweet song over field
and dell, calling home the faithful flocks. But the Mission
bells at San Borjas were not rung like that. Surprised at
the bells' outburst during my first afternoon, I was sure
that serious dirty work was going on in the belfry, and I
looked for the more righteous people to race up and punish
the sacrilegious hoodlums. Here, truly, would be happy ex-
citement, I thought maybe happy bloodshed.

For the bells hit the air in an outburst without warning
or melody. It was as if two inebriated blacksmiths had
stolen up there into the belfry while the music of the
dance was going on to have it out with sledgehammers.

All the birds, of course, had taken to instant flight from
the Mission roof. But strangely, other than that, only one
poor old hobbled burro and myself seemed much affected.
The burro reared and tried to get away. But the dance it-
self, across the Mission yard in front of the hut, did not
stop. The orchestra continued grinding away, although we
could hardly recognize the music through the competitive
thunder. We could only watch the motions of the musicians.

Why didn't the dance stop?

Two men in front of the hut put down their mutual
tequila bottle and ambled haphazardly across the long yard
toward the Mission entrance. Would they try to put a stop
to the noise up there? Hoping for the best, I followed.

But the bells, instead of subsiding, increased. I hadn't
heard anything yet. The ancient Mission is, as I've said,
made of stone. The stones picked up and echoed the vibra-
tions of the bells.

I followed my two tequila friends into the dusky interior

3O THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL

of the Mission. They tossed their straw sombreros into the
dry baptismal font near the entrance. It was then that I
noticed the baptismal font already was full of hats, a totter-
ing heap of them.

The quick transition from mountain sunlight to the
Mission's interior blinded me for a moment. When my
sight returned, I saw that dozens of people were inside.
They were marching round and round in an oval path.
At the head of the procession were two old ladies bearing
in their frail arms the heavy replica of Saint Borja, The
statue, in all its gaudy gold finery and blue robes, had been
removed from the altar, and was now being paraded around
the whole length of the Mission floor.

The replica of a saint always astonishes me. This one,
half human size, looked like an ossified dwarf whose help-
less face contained all the sorrows, if not of the world, then
certainly those of Lower California.

During this processional march with the saint, the can-
nonading continued as loud as ever in the belfry. Two
young men were up there. They were not ringing the bells,
they were smashing at them with pieces of iron. I wanted
to know the meaning of it all I still want to know.

1 am not much on religious ceremonies, nor an authority
on saints. But something tells me I was witnessing an un-
usual rite. To have asked during the affair was impossible
because of the thunder. Afterwards, when I asked, the an-
swers were much the same.

"We really don't know. But we've been doing it each
year here longer than we can remember."

"Doing exactly what?**

"Doing what you saw/*

THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL 31

"But just what was it I was seeing? I couldn't make it
out very well."

"I wish I could answer. But I don't know. It's all so very
old."

"Do they do it other places?"

"I don't know. I haven't been many other places."

Inside the Mission there was also an orchestra playing
its loudest against the clanging bells. Not the dance orches-
tra, which continued outside, but one made up of similar
people. It was all a blur of racket and marching.

The procession with the statue in the lead continued
around the Mission floor for fifteen minutes, I would say.
Finally the two old women in the lead began wavering
under their heavy burden. The procession halted while
they endeavored to hoist the figure up to its resting place
again.

As the women struggled with the replica, trying to edge
it back on the altar, the bedlam of orchestra and bells in-
creased. I had supposed they were already at saturation
point. I was wrong. The further outburst, I gathered, was
to encourage Saint Borja to be content on his pedestal for
another long year. I am only guessing, of course, but this
is the way it seemed to me.

Despite the bedlam of encouragement, the statue would
not slide upon the altar easily. "All right, he wants to be
walked around awhile longer. He likes it." The two old
women once again lifted their burden and tramped around
with it, the other people following.

Two more times as I watched, the statue was returned to
the altar; two more times I heard the bells increase their
encouragement, but the heavy image stuck at the edge of

32 THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL

the altar. This sticking could have been deliberate show-
manship on the part of the two old women. They might
have enjoyed prolonging their moment of importance. Or
perhaps by now they were too weak from their effort. But
there comes a time when all excitement, holy or secular,
does wear out.

On the fifth attempt two men (one being my tequila
friend) gave the statue a little unofficial prod of their own,
wherewith Saint Borja slid back upon the altar.

Instantly the bells stopped. Saint Borja was at rest for
another year.

This was the way I found San Borjas: semi-pagan reli-
gious rites within the candle-made shadows of the Mission,
and endless dancing in the courtyard outside.

Here was our own frontier of a hundred years ago, as
represented by fiddlers and hard-trying dancers doing their
best not to appear too awkward. The people of San Borjas
were awkward, even if you make allowance for the earth
floor. I would like to tell you of their doing Mexican hat
dances and all that sort of thing, the women wearing man-
tillas and combs. But that is a calendar picture idea. Their
dance was a combination of two-step and waltz, just a sort
of general hopping around. They would trip over their
own feet, giggle, then trip again.

Had I at first felt a temptation to laugh at their efforts
(and I truly doubt I did) I should have been ashamed of it
on the sixth day, when the dance slowly came to a close.

It was then that the few girls and women there were
not enough of them for partners changed from their best
frocks into the work garments of field and mountain. Their
Cinderella hour had struck, the year's one big time ended;

THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL 33

and once more they would scatter into the mountain dis-
tances o few visitors and the hard labor of wresting a daily
meal from the waterless earth.

If any of these people, except the tequila drunks, had
slept during the six days and nights of dancing, I was un-
aware of it. Yet on the final day, when the music was dwin-
dling into silence, I asked one of the men if he were tired.

"No, not tired, sir/' he answered. "But it is our hands.
Look." He showed me his fingers, worn and literally bleed-
ing from having thumped so long on the strings. I painted
his fingers with iodine, and the others came and asked me
to do the same for them.

I watched them as they scattered into the hills to round
up their burros for the homeward trek. I saw and heard
the dots which were men and boys scrambling and calling
over the cactus hillsides. The burros were obstinate. Ex-
cept for the one old burro that had been hobbled in the
Mission yard when the bells first thundered, the animals
had been turned loose to forage for themselves. They had
wandered far away and out of sight. But nobody seemed
very anxious to find them. The longer the burros stayed
lost, the longer was there excuse to linger at the Mission.

One by one the various parties, when at last they had
hauled their burros back into the Mission encampment,
began the long good-byes and the endless loading, the un-
loading again to see that nothing was missing from the
pack, then the slow reloading. And always, too, there was
just time enough for one more little drink, just time enough
to make one more little gift to somebody.

The girl who had impressed me as the belle of the ball
she was certainly the prettiest I now saw again just after

34 THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL

she had mounted her burro side-saddle. I saw her now,
not in her best dress of sweat-stained sateen, but in literally
the thickest of rags. Her hat was of floppy straw. She rode
last in the line of her party.

I don't know whether she had found a future husband
for herself at the festival (the annual San Borjas fiesta is the
occasion for unmarried to meet unmarried); but I do know
that she had been dancing six days and nights to oblige
the constant line of partners waiting to snatch her. So I saw
her now, as she followed her party up the rocky mountain-
side. Her eyes were not on the trail ahead. The burro could
look out for that. Her eyes remained back on San Borjas. It
would be another long year.

I thought I had better wave to her, so I tried it, but she
did not answer. Her father, at the head of the column, an-
swered instead.

By evening the Mission yard was entombed in a silence
almost as heavy as the din had been. Even the surrounding
hills echoed the sudden quiet. Nobody, no burro, was in
sight. And this is the way it would be for a long time to
come. Poor old Senor Fidel once again would have cause
for contentment. Perhaps by now he was getting some
much-deserved sleep. I would not waken him.

The little sulphur pool lay deserted within a thicket near
the cliff. There were hundreds of tracks around it. But
strangely there were no scraps, no leftover things. No cans.
No torn garments. No papers. These desert people do not
leave scraps. To them there are no left-over things.

I went down to the pool. It was all mine mine and the
dragonflies'.

CHAPTER 5

THE MORE one travels in the interior of the peninsula, the
more one realizes that here is no place for sweeping general
statements. We know that Lower California is almost
theatrically dry; yet a month or so before we completed
our trip, seventeen people were drowned in a rainstorm
in the Cape San Lucas region. That is, seventeen bodies
had been found before we arrived; but from time to time
more were unearthed from the debris. While villages had
been washed away, flooded out of existence, others had
been gutted or sliced in half. The declaration that Lower
California is a land of drouth must sound ironical to the
mourners.

This much is true of Lower California's aridity: A land
virtually as large as Italy, it has only one bona-fide cement
dam. This is the Rodriguez Dam, almost within rifle-shot
of the United States border, a few miles east of Tijuana
on the Tijuana River. Curiously enough, this brief river
rises and ends in the United States.

Still, there is rain in Lower California lots of it in some
places during the season. There are some rivers there, too
no great shakes as we think of rivers; but in the northern
section there are nearly as many rivers and as much rainfall
to store as in our own Southern California. They look and
act much as our rivers do, too. They are dry beds in summer
and torrential floods when a winter storm hits them. In
summer they are "upside-down" rivers, as the saying

35

36 THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL

dry beds of sand and stone with a water trace below,

"If that's the case/' you will ask, "why don't the Mexi-
cans do something about dams?"

The person who can answer this question is the first
person who can explain Mexicans.

Yes, for a long distance Lower California is but a con-
tinuation of our own Southern California. Much the same
topography, climate, and vegetation. It has much the same
possibilities. The border, after all, is not a natural one. It
is simply a wire fence, not a range of mountains.

But a strange thing begins to happen as you go down
the peninsula. That part of Lower California which is
but a continuation of Southern California begins to slide
more and more off into the Pacific, gradually petering off
into islands and submerged mountain peaks. Then Lower
California begins to take up climatically and topographi-
cally where the inland zones of Arizona have been cut off
by the GulL This is partly because the peninsula takes a
swing to the east. The top of it, for example, is about on the
same parallel as Douglas, Arizona. But the tip also reaches
down into the Tropic of Cancer.

The rain and storm season at the tip of the peninsula
comes in summer; in the northern part it is the same as in
Southern California in winter. This is the kind of thing
which upsets generalities about Lower California.

It is easy to assume that, because of its crudities, its
climate, and its remoteness, Lower California is a dif-
ficult place for Americans to live, or even dangerous to
travel in. I know that most of the few Americans who live
there year after year like it. Many of them are friends of
mine. I am not speaking of people who live in the border

THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL 37

towns, but of seasoned veterans like the Kenneth Browns of
El Marmol, or the James E. Hardings of El Arco, or the
Salve Melings of San Jose del Telmo, at the base of the
wild Sierra San Pedro Martir. This is a real family of
veterans. Each youngster had to live off the country on
burro trips to learn how, just "in case" . . .

These people have made Lower California their perma-
nent home. They know all the tricks of splicing broken
machinery or what to do when their cars are swallowed
in dust or chewed by cactus. Licking the difficulties of
Lower California is their everyday job. They are the pro-
fessionals, who make novices look silly. They are typified
in the famed Hattie Hamilton, who has turned the Hamil-
ton Ranch into an oasis of running water and vines and
fruit. They like their Lower California.

But sometimes even the professionals can guess wrong in
Lower California. Once the Browns were fourteen days
trying to reach San Diego to get provisions for their onyx
mines. The usual trip is about two days or so north of their
mine in El Marmol. It wasn't raining when they started,
and they had no way of knowing that just ahead of them
rain was falling in torrents. So, though they left in a drouth,
they ran smack into a flood. Their car was stranded in an
arroyo near Rosario. They had to wade through the muck
to the nearest hut and spend the night on a flea-infested
table there. All together, it took them two weeks to reach
San Diego.

For all that, the professionals of Lower California are
the best authorities to follow. Hear-say information, picked
up from encyclopedias and other strangers, you might just
as well toss out the window.

38 THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL

I can't imagine how I should have fared without the ad-
vice of the Bancrofts, Margaret and Griffing. Their home is
in San Diego, but Lower California has always been their
hobby, almost their passion. In their time they have gone
overland as far south as the road trail would take them,
and they have navigated their boat around the Cape and
into the Gulf, and to the islands surrounding the peninsula,
as they describe in their book, The Flight of the Least
Petrel. The lofty Sierra San Pedro Martir range in the
north has been a special favorite of theirs, especially Mar-
garet, who likes to ride horseback there with the Melings.

The Bancrofts and people like them have learned the
ways of the country through experience and have earned
the good will of the natives. A knowledge of Spanish is al-
most as important as arranging for a regular supply of gaso-
line. And it is equally essential to make no promises to the
natives which you don't intend to keep. People in this
desert-jungle have long memories, and in devious ways
can make or mar your journey.

Margaret Bancroft selected the gifts I took with me I
was actually about to go away with none. She advised me
that a bottle of bourbon can get one out of more holes in
Lower California than can a letter of introduction (and
that's true). She told me, also, to have candy always on
hand for the Mexican children of the wildlands.

"Just have it handy," she had said, "and you'll see what
I mean. Mexican parents can be reached easier through
their children."

I had known this before, in part, of course, but I never
had it brought more definitely home to me than In Lower
California.

THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL 39

Yes, the permanent American residents of Lower Califor-
nia get along. They have to. The only people who might be
said to have rivaled them in the battle of survival are the
Indians of old. They could survive everything, it seemed,
except the white man.

I wish the Indians of Lower California had left more
things around for us to see today, but they didn't have the
necessary talent for perpetuating a memory of themselves.

Archeologists, however, have not worked the peninsula
as exhaustively as they have worked other regions. Indeed,
Lower California is comparatively virginal in this respect.

So far as I could learn, these Indians on the peninsula
were not capable of building houses, nor even huts, to say
nothing of cities of antiquity. They lived much as coyotes
live in lairs. These lairs consisted, for the most part, of
scooped hollows under the brittle brush. Of marriage or
family life they were practically ignorant. They rutted in
season after the free-for-all manner of animals, and a male
could have as many females as cared to hang around with
him, helping to supply his food.

These aborigines of the peninsula no doubt represented
the lowest form of human life on our continent. Their eat-
ing habits had considerable to do with their reputation.
Food at times could be so scarce that the naked Indians
through generations had developed a trick whereby they
could eat the same piece of food several times. We have
the word of Clavigero, the Jesuit historian, that the Indians
in time of need would tie a string to a piece of sun-dried
meat, put it into their mouths, chew it for the flavor, and
swallow it, allowing the string to dangle outside the mouth.
"After the meat had,been in their stomachs a few minutes,

40 THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL

they would pull the meat back out, then repeat the process
on and on until the meat itself became too soft for further
use in this manner."

Clavigero, who certainly was no alarmist, describes also
how these Indians, following a feast of the cactus pitahaya
fruit, did not even allow the seeds to go to waste. Patiently
they would gather the undigested seeds from these de-
posits on the ground around the camps, grind these seeds
into flour, and use the flour in winter after the pitahaya
season had ended.

Distasteful as this may be, after one has been for some
weeks in the more waterless regions of cacti, sand, and rock,
the traveler cannot help feeling a peculiar admiration for
these savages of old who were cunning enough to live off
the land. Today, with rifles we could probably get along
for a time in the foothills.

But the Indians of old, though game was plentiful, were
poorly equipped for hunting. They used slings and clubs
and stones. But their bows and arrows did not amount, to
much, because of the scarcity of suitable wood. Yet the
Indian population was a big one to be supported on such
land. Because of the Indians the population of Lower Cali-
fornia, at the time of the coming of the Jesuits, was larger
by something like twenty or thirty thousand than the pres-
ent population of Lower California all told.

Of course, the fact is that the Indians did not care at all
what they ate to live. They were not at all squeamish.
Almost anything that had life in it was considered food,
grasshoppers, ants, snakes, bats, crickets, rats, mice, worms,
or even the very lice which clung to their own unwashed
bodies. For fruit they had the pitahaya o the cacti. But

THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL 41

even this fruit grows only seasonally, and the seasons do
not last long. Fortunately for me, I was in the heart of the
sour-pitahaya region during the season, and I must say
there is a lot to this fruit, after one manages to pluck it from
between the thorns and scrapes off the thorns from the
fruit itself. The native gatherers, when getting in a big
supply, generally use long poles with hooks on them.

The fruit, the shape of an apple, is juicy, sweet, and red.
But unfortunately for men, every creature of the desert is
out after the pitahaya during its brief season. All the birds
are after it. So are the coyotes. They have learned the trick
of how to knock down the fruit with the least possible
damage from the thorns. These coyotes, I trust, are not
frightened, as I was, with thoughts of an internal hemor-
rhage when their urine later shows a brilliant red.

I suppose the quickest way to learn how the Indians
managed to live in a land so dry and so harsh, is by living
as they did, if only for a day. If I were on my own I might
manage to keep alive for a few days, but I am sure I should
have no room at the same time for what politely is called
the sex-urge. Not so with the Indians. They had it all the
time. Apparently there was no waning in their great num-
bers until the coming of the Europeans.

Then they diminished, swiftly and in thousands, from the
social restrictions imposed by the missionaries, from con-
sumption, smallpox, syphilis, and slave work in the mission
fields.

Yet whatever we may think of these Indians now, and
regardless of the fact they have left us neither artful baskets
nor earthen jars nor weapons, these Lower California In-
dians got along far better in their peculiar land than did

42 THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL

the Europeans who came to instruct them.

Only once during my trip the length of Lower Califor-
nia did I come across a relic. It was an arrowhead. But I
did not find it. James E. Harding, the American mining
engineer at El Arco, had found it a few days previously near
a quartz deposit on one of his sites. As I am a push-over for
that sort of thing, I asked him to guide me to the spot in
the hope of finding more.

We went to the spot early one morning (the heat of the
Viscaino desert already registering 115 on the thermom-
eter inside the truck), and he showed me what he pre-
sumed to be the rock anvil used by the Indian in chipping
arrowheads.

Neither of us was sure of the proof in that matter, though,
for Harding explained that the arrowhead which he had
found there was of a stone from an entirely different coun-
try. As rocks are his business, I assume he was right.

But I asked to hold the arrowhead, and I made a copy
of its shape on paper. My one triumph, while other travel-
ers in the wilds find buried cathedrals!

It has long been debated whether the Indians of the
peninsula are tribally akin to those of the Mexican main-
land. I doubt it. Certainly the Indians on the mainland
have been exposed to all the familiar evils and have not
gone down. If anything, they are today finally winning the
war against their European conquerors. The Indian today
is actually a political influence in Mexico, He must have
been, then, of an entirely different race from the Lower
California Indian, and I can agree with those archeologists
who say as much.

This theory is all the more natural because of geography.

THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL 43

The wide Gulf which separated the Lower California In-
dian from the Indian of the mainland is a treacherous body
of water. The general belief is that the Indians who had
moved down into the peninsula through the ages had been
driven there by the more powerful Indians of the north.
The peninsula not only is shaped like a cul-de-sac, but also
served as one, and from it there was nowhere for the re-
treating Indians to retreat. The peninsula caught and held
the racial fugitives, and they in turn formed their own
minor tribes in the wasteland wilderness. It was a case of
culls and weaklings getting together for sanctuary in a land
so harsh that none of the more warlike Indians of the north
bothered to invade it. They did not especially want to live
there anyhow if they could help it.

To list the names of the various Lower California tribes
would be rather useless today, since so few full-blooded
Indians are left on the peninsula, and even the names of
the former tribes mean nothing anymore. Most of the few
surviving Indians today live in the more northern moun-
tainous regions.

Roughly, this much is certain: the more northerly the
tribe, the more it resembled the Yumas of the Colorado.
Indeed, one could safely say that the northern Indians of
the peninsula were a low-grade Yuma. The dialect and
idiom was much the same, although the peninsula Indians
did develop different words for objects. And the Indians
along the northern Lower California coast were much the
same, too, as the aborigines between today's San Diego and
Santa Barbara. The difference, if any, was minute, both in
the manner of the males going completely naked and the
females wearing skirts of deer- or rabbit-skin.

44 THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL

Yet had we moved southward in the old days down the
peninsula, we would hav^-noticed a gradual decline in any
native attempts at arts or crafts. The coastal Indians of
what today is Southern California did succeed, at least, in
making jars for storing acorn-meal. True, the jars weren't
of much account. They crumbled easily and rarely were
embellished with decorations. But the midland and south-
ern Indians of Lower California not only did not make jars,
they didn't even know what a jar was when they saw one.

The Jesuit Clavigero tells a strange story. Some large
earthen jars had been left on the sands of the Pacific shore
by sailors from a Philippine Galleon. Indians found the
jars later and, not knowing what they were, carried them
to a near-by cave. Here they placed the jars upon their
sides in the entrance of the cave, but ever remained aston-
ished that the mouths of the jars were always wide open,
and yet never issued a sound. The Indians originated a
dance wherein they leaped about with their mouths open
in imitation of the jars.

The full story of these jars is too long to tell here, but the
climax came several years afterward when the Indians were
stricken by a mysterious sickness. The wise men of the tribe
Suggested that the sickness had been transmitted through
the mouths of these creatures which had been found on the
beach. The mouths of the jars would have to be plugged.
The bravest young man of the tribe volunteered for the
job. He sneaked up on the jars from behind so that the
open mouths would not be aimed at him. By reaching from
behind he cautiously stuffed the mouths shut with grass.

I should like to have talked with some surviving old
Indian just to have gotten his or her memories of the

THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL 45

transition period. But the nearest I came to getting an
Indian's own view o the whole departed show had been
at and I must keep mentioning the place San Borjas.
Even so, it was second-hand. Senor Fidel gave me the story
of an old Indian, a friend of his, who died not long ago.

This Indian, as a boy, had not wanted to be taken and
converted at the Mission, Fidel told me. The boy's parents
and most of the other Indians of the district had been cap-
tured, converted, and held in sacred obedience as toilers
on the Mission grounds. The boy wanted none of it. He
roamed the hills, finding his own food; and was described
by the missionaries as "a wild boy" who must be captured
before he did harm.

The boy, though, managed to elude all pursuers. The
only way he could be caught, the missionaries concluded,
was by trapping him like a wild animal. This they finally
did. He was caught in a canyon by the same sort of rope
snare which is used in trapping wild burros. He was carried
a prisoner to the Mission of San Borjas and baptised. It was
all over then. The boy gave up; and all day long with the
rest of the Indians he carried stones, forty-five pounds to
the load.

But strangely, this old Indian, after he had capitulated
to the new way as a boy, proved in later years to be the most
loyal of the communicants at the Mission of San Borjas
when the last of its padres was ordered away. It was he who
had hidden and buried as much of the paraphernalia as he
could save from vandals. The Mission originally had four
bells. He buried them all, and later unearthed two of them.
The other two remain hidden; and with the old Indian's
death went the secret of their hiding place. Much of the

46 THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL

rest of the equipment the old Indian already had uncovered
bit by bit;*and this is the paraphernalia I saw in use in the
Mission of San Borjas when I was there.

"That animal-trap when I was a boy snapped my heart."
This is the expression the old Indian used in explaining to
Fidel why he hadn't struggled longer for his own way of
life. This Indian's story, I think, is typical of the fate of
his race in Lower California.

CHAPTER 6

IN LOWER CALIFORNIA three adobe huts, or even two, will
be marked on the map as a village, so the map at times can
be dangerous. An inexperienced traveler is prone to count
on renewing his water supply, his food, or if he is excep-
tionally inexperienced his gas, at the next village. When
he does reach it, the next village may have its thatched
roofs that have caved in, no water anywhere, and nobody in
sight at all. The single family, which probably comprised
the whole population, may have loaded its burros and
moved away to God knows where, in search of water.

Along the entire length of Lower California wilderness
road there are six towns which have color and permanence
about them. As one bumps along over the volcanic dust
and rocks of the Camino Real, each of them becomes a goal.
These six larger towns on which one can definitely count,
and which are worth seeing for their individuality, are
(starting from the northern midlands) San Ignacio, Santa
Rosalia, Mulege, Comondu, La Paz, and San Jos^ del Cabo
at the very tip. These towns are sure to be there when you
come along; for, with the possible exception of the copper
town of Santa Rosalia, they were there long before your
great-great-grandmother was alive.

Excepting Santa Rosalia, they were ancient towns when
the Camino Real burst into renewed life during the Cali-
fornia Gold Rush. The more foolish of the Forty-Niners
had supposed, by looking at a map, that Lower California

47

48 THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL

might serve as an overland short cut from the south to San
Francisco. Or at least a cheaper route. They could get to
Lower California by boat, all right, either from Mexico's
mainland, or from Panama, or from Nicaragua. And Lower
California itself appeared simple on the map.

Hordes tried it, and hordes died. If the Magdalena Plain
did not get them, the Vizcaino Desert did. Those who tried
the eastern side, the Gulf trails, found themselves entangled
in bewildering mountains. But at least, even if they died of
thirst, the thrifty Yanks had saved additional boatfare.

In naming the six permanent towns of Lower California
I have deliberately omitted the border towns of Tijuana,
Tecate, and Mexicali; and I have omitted Ensenada, which
certainly is permanent enough, but is by no means typicall)
Mexican. It was founded long ago by an English-American
syndicate, and the framed wooden buildings look like it.
Besides, Ensenada, connected by a paved highway to San
Diego, can be reached winter or summer, through rains or
drouth, and is not at all typical of Lower California towns.
Ensenada, where American money is more in use than
pesos, is actually the jumping-off place. The pavement
ends there, but the telephone wire continues on for some
miles yet. On a telephone pole the first day out of Ensenada,
we saw two young wildcats staring at us in midday. How
the two had come to be stranded on the top of the pole is
their own secret. Coyotes may have chased them up there
the previous night. But t\vo wildcats clinging to the tip of
the same little telephone pole did seem to us as being worth
a picture, our first, even though the trip had hardly begun.
We could have killed both the cats with a single bullet, so
tightly were they pressed together. However, we were not

THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL 49

out to kill just for the killing, but to collect specimens. The
wildcats were o a common variety, not specimens for the
museum. We shook the pole, shook it and shook it, until
the wildcats one at a time tumbled down. Otherwise, they
might have stayed up there forever. But away they went,
hissing and galloping, into the bush, and hating us, their
liberators.

Like Tijuana, Ensenada is a fair place to change one's
dollars into pesos. And a fair place, too, to have one's last
meal served American-style.

From there on, after twenty or thirty miles of graded dirt
road, the bumps begin in earnest. And so does the wilder-
ness which is Lower California. After leaving Ensenada the
purchase of any more American gasoline becomes a matter
of luck, even in the larger towns below.

Fortunately, we had not trusted to luck, or we should
never have completed our journey. Our luck would have
been bad everywhere, except possibly at Santa Rosalia. We
might have bought a little Mexican gas in a few places, but
the mileage it gives is terrible, especially in a truck. For,
come to think of it, we traveled mostly in second, third, or
fourth gear all the way down. Only once can I recall having
traveled any distance at all (an hour maybe) in high gear.
The triumph of that dizzy hour was promptly blasted by
our suddenly bumping into the worst chuck-holes of all.
That is the way it goes.

The veterans of Lower California trucking, the Parra
brothers, dropped off gasoline drums for us at San Ignacio
on their run to Santa Rosalia, their terminus. If anybody
can get through, the Parras can; but sometimes they fail
too, as when a sudden storm caught a truck in the middle

50 THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL

of an arroyo. The Parras have pictures of the top of the
truck barely showing above the flash-flood.

For a well-earned price, then, they had dropped our
drums ahead of us at the places we designated, the last of
them with mutual friends at San Ignacio. Gasoline is such
a rare item down there that drums are not to be left with
just anybody. They must be cached inside the huts of
friends friends who will not be tempted into selling "just
a bit of it" to beseeching people.

An engine without gas is, of course, embarrassing at any
time, anywhere. But in the Never-Never Land of Lower
California an engine without gas is not only embarrassing
but fatal. All one can do is get out and talk to the cacti for
a day or so, until some Samaritan comes along. Only the
Samaritan, alas, may, like the original Samaritan, be travel-
ing on a burro, which presumably does not carry gas.

The first day's goal, depending on how late one starts out
of Ensenada, is either the Johnson Ranch or the Hattie
Hamilton Ranch further on 113 miles from Tijuana. But
here I go, charting the route, which I certainly did not in-
tend to do. At least not now. My intentions, in all inno-
cence, are merely to show how a traveler soon finds himself
blending off into the wildwoods before he has time quite to
realize he is no longer in reach of gas stations. He might,
to repeat, be able to buy gas if there happens to be any
stores around in places, but one is the sisterhood of the
Five Foolish Virgins to count on getting another cupful
of it.

Also, and as much as I hate thank-you letters, I do have
a lot of people to thank for our gasoline luck. Frank
Gillelan, Jr., for instance, and the Gilmorc Oil Company

THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL 51

he represented in San Diego. The whole thing, after all, was
sort o a challenge to all concerned, at a time when the
new government laws prohibited the obtaining of gasoline
drums in the United States. We could get a few drums
across the border in Tijuana, and it was here that the gaso-
line was loaded in drums on Parra's truck. Without Frank
Gillelan's help, we couldn't have made the trip.

There are some marker settlements well worth aiming for
before reaching the Mexican towns themselves. The onyx-
mining settlement of El Marmol, American-owned but
with all-Mexican labor, is among the first of these. Nor can
I see any excuse, really, for not describing it next, the place
with the only onyx schoolhouse in the world.

The general belief is that Lower California is "so rich
with minerals" that all one has to do to find gold is to go
down there and start digging. The problem is not one of
finding gold or silver, so the legend goes, but of getting the
minerals out after they are found. The land lacks both a
railroad and steady streams for working. The land not only
lacks both these facilities; it is also without the fabulous
deposits of minerals accredited to it.

But during the recent years, while other mines have flour-
ished for a brief time and perished, the onyx mine of El
Marmol, apparently, is going on forever, and is likely to
continue producing as long as people want onyx inkstands,
onyx bathtubs, onyx statues, onyx panels, and onyx decora-
tions.

The mine at El Marmol has been in operation more than
thirty-five years, and those years haven't been easy. The
trouble has not been in mining the onyx, for layers and
layers of it He right there, virtually on open ground. And

52 THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL

there's so much of it that if three hundred men worked
steadily for forty more years there would still be a lot of
onyx left. The difficulty has been, of course, the shipping of
the giant blocks to San Diego, the distributing center of the
company. The great slabs can be whittled out of the earth
in any specified size or shape. Ten tons, twenty tons, or, for
that matter, a few pounds. There's an Indian statue in
St. Paul, Minnesota, for instance, which stands thirty-seven
feet high and twenty feet at the base. And at the base are five
life-sized Indians worshiping. All of this is made from onyx
blocks taken out of El Marmol.

During my twenty years in San Diego I have seen onyx
blocks shipped in periodically aboard the company's tiny
vessel. The ship has to be comparatively tiny, of a draft
slight enough to allow her to ride just outside the surf-line
at a bleak Lower California shore point called Santa Cata-
rina. Here the onyx blocks are loaded, one by one, out
through the surf. It's a dangerous job that could cost many a
life. Santa Catarina is a long way from El Marmol, slightly
less than fifty miles, over a desert road which the company
itself has built and maintained. Today the carting is done
by truck. In the old days it was done by mule-teams, six
days for the round trip.

In comparison to onyx, gold or silver ore would be a
pushover to handle. But the onyx mine proves that if Lower
California were "so rich in minerals" as is generally sup-
posed, these rich minerals could be gotten out somehow.
Kenneth Brown, who runs El Marmol, is a veteran miner.
So was his famous father before him, who' worked the old
copper mine on Cedros Island, and also started the gold
mine at a place later known as Brownsville, in Lower Cali-

1'

ONYX QUARRY AT EL MARMOL

JAIL AT EL ARCO

THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL 53

fornia. Neither of these mines had presented physical prob-
lems to compare with the job of getting ten-ton onyx blocks
fifty miles to the shore, through the surf, then to San Diego.

El Marmol was started literally from scratch. An old pros-
pector (I forgot whether he was a Dutchman or a Scandi-
navian) was first to scratch beneath the marblelike out-
croppings on the wind-swept desert where today sits the
compact little company-village of El Marmol, commonly
called in English "the Onyx/' El Marmol means, of course,
"the Marble," but the Spanish name sounds prettier.

It's a harsh little village there in the open, and from a
distance rather resembles one of our old western towns on
the plains. Trees do not grow there very well, even when
planted and tended. Windmills provide power and water,
and all that can be done toward conquering the odds has
been done. The village is the cleanest Mexican desert vil-
lage on the whole peninsula, despite frequent dust-winds.

Kenneth Brown learned fluent Spanish as a lad, and he is
everything from the village doctor to the civil clerk, if need
be, in case of marriages. Just before my visit there he had
saved the life of a Mexican fisherman whose arm had been
blown off dynamiting fish in the Gulf.

Though out of sight because of a range of hills, the Gulf
is not far away to the east. The company road of El Marmol,
however, leads to the Pacific.

"But you can see the Gulf from the top of that hill over
there," Kenneth Brown told me. He nodded toward a peak
about five miles away.

"Have you ever gone up there to see it?"

"No," he grinned. "I've never thought of doing it."
Which is generally the way.

54 THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL

His foreman is a lively old Mexican called Don Reyes
(Reyes C. Quinos) who has been at the Onyx thirty years.
All of the hundred or so active employees are Mexican. This
makes El Marniol the center of just about the most impor-
tant industry in the northern section of Lower California.
Most of the Mexican families in a radius of three hundred
miles are more or less dependent on the onyx of El Marmol.

Kenneth Brown, the one American, has a great responsi-
bility. Knowing how Mexicans like to strike and how they
like to raise hell with industry, Brown is compelled to be
expert in Mexican psychology. So far, he has had no trouble.
As far as I know, he is the one American mining man down
there who has been so fortunate. He gives a lot of the credit
to the training his father gave him.

Don Reyes, the Mexican foreman, accompanied us on the
rounds of the quarry the largest onyx quarry on earth. He
said that at one time a live frog was found inside a block of
onyx. The block, Don Reyes said, contained a little pocket
of enclosed water, which is not unusual. This meant that
the frog had been there ever since the onyx was formed,
away back there in Bible times. I don't believe the story, of
course, but I do believe that Don Reyes and the workmen
thoroughly believed it. For "all of them saw it" The frog,
they said, was "a sort of milky transparent/* and as soon as
air reached it, it died.

In front of Don Reyes and the other Mexicans, I asked
Kenneth Brown if it were true or not about the live frog.
Kenneth is Mexican-wise.

"I wasn't here at the time,' 1 he answered, "But all these
people say it is true/'

All onyx looks filmy, and is o the same color when first

THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL 55

unearthed. To determine its real colors you wet a portion
of the block. The colors come out at once. Pure white is the
most valuable. If you strike the onyx slabs with a piece of
metal, they ring a long musical sound.

The onyx lies in layers so close to the surface that the
pits are mere hollows. At one of them, where the Mexicans
were working a hand-crane, I saw some water, about a ba-
sinful, within a surface hollow in an onyx block. I saw a
Mexican workman leave the hand-crane and replenish the
water. The sun had evaporated some of it.

"What's the water for?" I asked.

'Tor the bees."

"For the what?" I felt I must have misunderstood.

"For the bees," he repeated.

The purpose was this: The bees would come for the
water. The workmen would watch which way the bees de-
parted, and afterward would trail them the four or five
miles to the pockets of wild honey. A Mexican is still a Mex-
ican, whether working an onyx mine or a farm.

The company built the schoolhouse and pays the salary
of the teacher. The little schoolhouse, built of onyx, would
have the value in the United States of a small cathedral.
For the sake of coolness, its roof is of the customary thatch.
But somehow, no one in El Marmol finds incongruity in a
thatched roof supported by walls of the richest onyx.

We asked the young teacher if he would let us take a
picture of him and his class. The excitement was greater
than a fire-drill. School was instantly dismissed. All the chil-
dren were ordered to scurry to their homes and get into
their best clothes. We waited a long time. The children
finally returned, no longer the Mexican children we had

56 THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL

seen before. They had been transformed Into polished little
angels, their hair glistening from perfect combings, their
shoes polished like onyx, and their stern faces as they
posed as rigid as the stone itself. They moved not a muscle
as they stood there in a stiff array of two rows beneath the
hot sun.

It must have been a history-making day for them. And for
the teacher. He, too, neither moved nor smiled.

"There, the picture's taken," we finally said. But still they
didn't move. They were taking no chances. They wanted to
be sure.

CHAPTER 7

IF THIS were a travelogue, there are several places I should
mention, including overnight camping spots in the open.
But none of them are marker spots, nor are they goals to
aim for as you bump southward. They are just there, some-
where.

We left El Marmol and replenished our fuel tank with
our own cached gasoline at the group of run-down adobe
huts which comprise the settlement of Punta Prieta. Then
we went off on a tangent into the mountains of San Borjas;
and after that our aim was to reach San Ignacio without
a breakdown, God willing.

San Ignacio was a special sort of goal. Once you reach it,
you feel a little pride in saying you got there overland. Here
were date palms, the running water of a river valley, cob-
bled streets, and the first of anything naturally green and
rich and permanent. San Ignacio, the first town of antiq-
uity. There would be food, and there might even be ice.
All the volcanic dust of the journey would be worth it if we
could safely hurdle the remaining rocks on the Rocky Road
to San Ignacio.

But I'm not there yet. I'm merely recounting the build-up
one acquires during the days and days before. San Ignaci,o
is the place 1 Don't give up, sir; don't give up for anything
till you get there. Thus it goes.

After leaving San Borjas, the smart thing to do was to get
back somehow onto the Camino Real and head for the

57

58 THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL

mining town of El Arco. We had letters and messages to
deliver to James and Josephine Harding, who had lived
there for a long time. And letters to be delivered in Lower
California are a sacred trust. Besides, at El Arco we could
have a bath.

El Arco is a flat little mining settlement on the edge of
the hot Vizcaino Desert, just on the border between the
Northern District and the Southern District. All the coun-
try below El Arco is administered by the District govern-
ment in far-away La Paz, near the southern tip of the penin-
sula.

The Hardings live in a reddish adobe-brick cottage cov-
ered with a thatched roof of beautiful workmanship. And,
wonderful thing! the Hardings have a refrigerator. The
cottage has practically everything except glass windows.
They had never succeeded in getting the glass over the long
rocky trail unbroken.

They don't, however, have fresh vegetables, and they
don't have a thermometer. They get on very well without
the latter they don't want to know how hot it is. They
have lived so long in the desert heat that they like it. They
told me so themselves.

Fresh vegetables are a different matter. On her occasional
treks to the States, Mrs. Harding's greatest luxury is celery
then more celery.

The Hardings used to have an airplane, when the gold
mine in El Arco was going well. Later agrarians and so-
called "labor leaders" moved in, one at a time, as usual, and
tried to run the mine. Also as usual, they ruined the machin-
ery instead and asked the Hardings to come back. With the
airplane the Hardings brought fresh fish from the Gulf.

THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL 59

They could land near the shore of the Gulf, get their fish,
and bring them back for supper. It all helped.

They still keep their landing field in good condition.
The Browns at El Marmol are in the same fix they have a
landing field but no airplane. The flying time from the
American border to El Marmol is only an hour and a half,
and it had taken us several days.

The Browns and the Hardings, though days apart by
road, have developed a Livingstone-Stanley friendship. The
two families make use of passing travelers to deliver mes-
sages. There are no telephones, nothing between them but
distance, the long, twisting, empty trail of the Camino Real.

The old mining town of Calmalli, near El Arco, is gone.
No one remembers it today except for its unusually good
water. Calmalli is another of the mining spots that petered
out, and now El Arco has risen to take its place.

The Hardings and I talked far into the night. We were
like jungle dwellers suddenly come together after a long
absence. We talked about cactus, antelope, lions. ... As
we talked we drank with actual lumps of ice, mind you
the diminishing supply of bourbon from the truck. And
at the end of the evening there was a shower bath, a real
one with water which ran when you turned it on. None
of the usual Lower California gurgle and dry gasp in the
faucet.

Mrs. Harding apologized for the lack of festal candles.
She tried to buy some in the mining store, but there wasn't
one to be had. A Mexican adobe-maker had bought them
all the night before. He had just finished a batch of bricks
and put them in the sun to dry. Then he began to worry.
There had been no rain for too long, and suddenly he was

6o THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL

afraid the much-needed rain might come while his bricks
were drying. He bought all the candles in the store and
burned them to the Virgin with a prayer for no rain.

El Arco had a jail, a cave dug into the wall of the arroyo
which runs through the settlement. An iron gate was slung
across the mouth of the stone cave and there you are a
jail. But no prisoner could dig himself out unless he brought
in enough dynamite to blow himself out.

El Arco is a drab little settlement straddling the two
districts of Lower California, It has been, and perhaps still
is, the place to which renegades from both districts flee for
sanctuary. If the police of the Southern District are after
you, you just step across the border to El Arco, and you're
beyond their jurisdiction. It works the same way from north
to south, too. There are times when James Harding has
to serve personally as the three J's jury, judge, and jailer.
He thinks a lot of that cave in the side of the arroyo. It has
served the settlement well. Its windowless interior, he says,
has re-Christianized many a would-be bad man overnight.

Wherever there was once a mission and a steady supply
of fresh water, there is now a village. San Ignacio is such
a one. With El Arco behind us, we looked ahead to San
Ignacio for the sight of a stream that ran all year round,
not just after a cloudburst* We made dry camp wherever
night overtook us, rolling out our folding cots and sleeping
bags, and using the water we carried in the truck. It was
routine not to expect a water hole.

Since the long trail of El Camino Real is still essentially
a burro trail, a traveler instinctively thinks of the early
voyagers who inched their way along the same route in the

THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL 6l

old days. I suppose one reason why Lower California is not
marked with monuments along the trail is because the past
is still too present for monuments to be needed. Along the
main coastal highways in Upper California we find stone
monuments to Father Serra and the other padres wherever
we ride. But on the winding trail down the length of Lower
California there are only the missions themselves to com-
memorate the Jesuits who blazed the rocky trail and found
the permanent watering places. As you grind south in a
truck, you can see yourself waving a dusty salute to Father
Salvatierra or Father Bravo or Father Ugarte, doughty
Jesuits plodding north. If a highway some day enables
travelers to spin merrily along, thinking of the past only
as a curiosity, probably monuments to the padres will
spring up.

I, for one, shall not envy those future sightseers of Lower
California, whirling from gas station to gas station in com-
fort and security. They will have no chance to take in every
curious cactus bush, raw arroyo, odd rock, and wild animal
track in the dust.

Speaking of wild animal tracks brings to mind the big-
game hunter, who would probably see Lower California
in a very different light from me. His photographs would
show him draped with more quail than he could eat, or
proudly kneeling by the head of a dead bighorn. He would
probably be unmindful that Mexicans today desperately
need every ounce of game in the hills. And no doubt he
would ignore the fact that the spectacle of wealthy Ameri-
can hunters with costly rifles in Lower California can be
as greatly resented by natives as we would resent it if the
Mexicans crossed our border and, just for fun, made a field-

62 THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL

day of it in our farmyards, shooting chickens, pigs, and
heifers.

So I am not going to be too specific about the places where
a few bighorn still exist in the long Sierra San Pedro Martir,
or the Sierra de Calmajuey San Jos, or the freakish plateau
of San Carlos a lost world in the sky if ever there was one.
The names themselves mean nothing. It's how to get there
that counts, and that's the secret.

I don't want to be too self-righteous about this. We would
have used a deer for meat in our dry camps if we could have
killed one. But we didn't see a deer the whole length of
the Camino Real, a surprising thing. We saw their tracks
and those of coyotes, and once a mountain lion, in the dust
ahead of us. But already there are not so many deer as there
used to be in Lower California. The toll has been taken,
and with it the deer have gained wisdom.

No matter where we pitched our dry camps, we always
seemed to be near a colony of kangaroo-rats or kangaroo-
mice. Actually, they are neither rats nor mice, but little
seed-feeding creatures that hop around on their hind legs
and are easily bewildered by spotlight or lantern. They
are the desert planters. They carry desert seeds from place
to place, or store them in tiny holes.

The naturalists were after specimens, a group from here,
a group from there, as soon as we had established a dry
camp for the night. We must have looked odd with our
meandering hunting lights and, to the Mexicans, probably
crazy. The naturalists told me of a time when one of them
disrupted the peace and quiet of a northern Mexican vil-
lage. He had, it seemed, been pursuing by lantern-light
his traps in the village's near-by cemetery. He had not

THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL 6g

really known he was in a cemetery, but the villagers from
a distance knew a light was down there, and that the mysteri-
ous light was moving back and forth and around in circles.
The result was an awesome panic, and another raid on the
seller of holy candles.

This talk of our nightly dry camps is getting me no nearer
to our first sight of all-year-round running water in San
Ignacio. Well, we got there. After doing our last twenty
miles or so over volcanic rocks we arrived of a late after-
noon. We looked down over the rim of a broad arroyo, and
there was San Ignacio. Our first sight was just as it had
been described to us: a forest of palm trees, and blessed
running water running through the streets in a narrow
trough. A regular little stream fed the trough, and a small
foot-bridge crossed the stream. Date-palms lined the banks.
I was looking at heaven.

We had been told to ask for Mrs. Learie, a long-time
resident of San Ignacio. Her name sounds Irish, but she is
mostly French. She runs a clean little hotel for travelers
in connection with her home. We had some gifts for her,
some cloth and patterns, sent by the Griffing Bancrofts of
San Diego. I asked for her as soon as we hit town and was
directed to her house near the plaza. She wasn't at home.
She wouldn't be home for another two months. She was in
Santa Rosalia.

Her sister was there, though. Her sister can't talk English.
But she showed us where we could sleep, and she pointed
out to us a little family restaurant two blocks away where
we could eat, and she agreed with us politely that it was too
bad Mrs. Learie wasn't home.

With San Ignacio we had reached a point approximately

64 THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL

halfway down the peninsula. As yet we had not seen the
Gulf, but soon we were to have our first glimpse o it, when
we left San Ignacio and headed almost due west, across the
Yaqui Plain, and the Canyon-of-the-Devil, for Santa Rosalia,
the copper-town directly on the shore of the Gulf.

I am speaking of this now, not because it belongs here,
but because I remember how eager I was to get my first
swim in the Gulf. And I wanted to be able to say afterward:
"But we got as far as Santa Rosalia, anyhow." There it was
again, the same old vanity. "Yep, we got as far as Santa
Rosalia, anyhow, before we broke down."

I soon learned that visitors are no longer a rarity in San
Ignacio. They can come there now from Mexico's main-
land. Even the most unadventurous tourists can make the
trip by crossing the Gulf on a ferry from Guaymas on the
mainland to Santa Rosalia. There they can rent a car and
drive the distance inland to San Ignacio. It's a tricky road,
steep and twisting in places, but passable. And apparently
they have done it. One gathers this, first of all, from the
behavior of the street boys.

These boys do what no isolated Mexican children ever
do they beg. I was surprised. I had been seeing the coun-
try Mexican children only, who had received our little gifts
with native grace. Bashful about accepting anything, the
country children would smile and say "thank you" in Span-
ish. Their parents would smile all over, also, and tell their
children to say "thank you" once again.

But the street boys of San Ignacio came right out and
asked us for money. It was on the cobbled streets of San
Ignacio, too, that, on returning to our dust-coated truck,
I saw where artful hands had been at play. The designs

THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL 65

printed on the dusty car were identical in spirit with the
bathroom frescoes of Pompeii.

Now we were in our first big permanent town of antiquity
a town much older than anything we have in Upper Cali-
fornia. The Mission of San Ignacio, perhaps the most photo-
graphed of all Lower California missions, is not a little
adobe structure, but a giant edifice of several stories which
resembles a cathedral. The Mission, facing the plaza, domi-
nates the town and is still very much in use each day. It
is said to be the best preserved Mission on the peninsula,
but I can't say for sure.

But I can say for sure that the village of San Ignacio is
no longer as quaint as a few previous visitors had said it
would be. It has gone town-smart, comparatively. The im-
proved road between San Ignacio and the Gulf harbor of
Santa Rosalia is the reason, I think.

Agrarians are another reason. Wherever agrarians have
moved in Lower California they have upset the apple-cart
of stability. Toiling very little, and spinning less, these peo-
ple drift only to those parts which already have been de-
veloped by someone else's ingenuity, and they take over
in the name of law. Then they wreck. They have been
known to cut down lime trees to make it easier to pick
the crop someone else's planted crop.

The agrarians have moved into San Ignacio. They have
built their own colony of shacks (with someone else's lum-
ber) along one side of the stream. There they are waiting,
and from there they are plundering, all in the name of legal
privileges. San Ignacio has changed in spirit.

The ancient cobbled streets have not changed, nor the
old adobe homes, nor the little adobe stores which resemble

66 THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL

homes. Nor the iron cages in front of all the windows.

From posted hand-written signs we saw that "The Great
Osman Magician" was soon to perform in San Ignacio.
He was to use for a theater the old nunnery of San Ignacio.
The interior of the walls are moldy and have no windows
for ventilation. Yet hundreds and hundreds would attend,
we were told. There would be standing room only. Un-
fortunately we could not wait till next week to see the
Great Osman, or his assistant who, according to the placards,
was beautiful-divine.

Though the bird's-eye length of Lower California is
slightly more than eight hundred miles, our speedometer
showed we already had zigzagged this many miles to reach
San Ignacio, approximately halfway down. The map proved
one thing; the distance of the course, another. Yet only
once throughout the length were we ever confused about
which road to take. We became confused much later about
a branch road to Loreto.

But other than that one time (on the way to Comondu)
we did not have to waste any energy worrying about the
possibility of being on a wrong road, simply because there
is virtually only one road the length of the peninsula. But,
no! That isn't quite right. There are thousands of roads,
there are thousands of wheel-and-burro ruts. But all of
them twist and beat their way along in the same general
direction side by side.

A driver's problem is not to puzzle over guessing the
general direction the new ruts may take. His problem is
to try to guess each five minutes which ruts to follow. One
can call it "fielder's choice/' For after each rain, or after
each dust-storm, the natives develop new ruts to encircle

THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL 67

some newly made difficulty or to get around some newly
washed-out arroyo. The various ruts remain, perhaps fifty
feet apart or fifty yards apart, or even a mile apart; but the
smartest trick is to follow those ruts that have been the
most recently made.

For our "fielder's choice" we had tried to follow as closely
as possible the ruts previously made by the veteran Parra,
the trucking contractor. The name Parra runs like a re-
frain through the Northern District. He is the stageman,
the postman, the delivery boy. "Parra will do it for you if
anybody can/*

But San Ignacio virtually is the end of the line for him.
He continues the camparatively few miles to Santa Rosalia,
and that is all. Santa Rosalia is his southern terminus, so to
speak. So he had cached our last drum, as he had said he
would, under the guardianship of the Learie home. The
full drum was waiting for us there within the patio. Once
again, at sight of the prized possession, I felt like writing
a letter of thanksgiving back to Frank Gillelan, Jr. But I
didn't write the letter. 1 went to the town's bar instead.

Had the gasoline drum not been there intact, and had
he not supervised the loading so well in the name of his
Gilmore Company, our trip might have ended right there.
Or we might not even have gotten that far. This is why I
do not feel it to be at all out-of-place to tell him how good
that drum looked a thanks several months overdue.

Our trick all along had been to use only half the gasoline
from a drum, and to save the rest for the return. Somewhere
in the Southern District, perhaps at La Paz, we counted
on buying Mexican gasoline, if possible, to fill a breach.
We did manage to do so ultimately, but Mexican gasoline,

68 THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL

as I have said before, is god-awful.

But anyhow we had reached the first oasis! The full name,
if it matters, is San Ignacio Kada Kaman, meaning the
country of sedge brooks. It could as easily be called the
oasis-surrounded-by-volcanic-rocks; brown and black and
burned. Not far away are the silent tips of the Three Virgins,
extinct volcanoes.

I had heard before coming here that these Three Virgins
had once been active during our own time. But in San
Ignacio, when I asked the bartender about them, he replied,
in Spanish, that nobody knew when last they had been
active. I really didn't care very much what he answered,
for in front of me was beer real beer the first beer since
Ensenada so long ago.

I should have preferred whisky, but whisky was not for
sale over the bar in San Ignacio. I don't know why. One
of those periodical laws, I presume. The bartender, though,
sent a boy out to buy dates for me. I gave the boy a peso,
and he returned with a heaping sackful. A poolroom was
attached to the bar. It was filled with the younger element
of what would correspond to our high-school age. They
clustered around me at the bar for my beers and my ciga-
rettes and to tell me dirty stories in Spanish. I think we all
had a good time.

The boys said my dates were inferior too dry to what
I might have had if I had reached San Ignacio earlier in
the season. I had to take the young men's word for it, as
certainly they had been born looking at dates, the padre-
planted dates of San Ignacio, and so had their grandfathers
ahead of them. Yet, surprisingly, the young men continued
eating the dates out of the bag almost as readily as I, date-

THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL 69

famished, did. We tossed the seeds out the bar window onto
the dark town. No street-lights or store-lights were on in
San Ignacio after nine o'clock.

The famed Mission of San Ignacio shut its doors at night
too. It was closed and dark, only its spiral outlines showing
there in the center of the black town. But it would be
open the first thing in the morning, the young men told
me in Spanish, "if you want to make a confession."

There was a well-dressed German in San Ignacio. He
was the first outright German in Lower California who
yet had introduced himself to us. The others had rather
avoided us. But this German said outright, and for no
special reason, that he hated the Nazis and Hitler. But he
said it all a little too vehemently. His attempt at English
was atrocious. His Spanish was wobbly. He said he was a
doctor. As if to prove it, he carried a stethoscope around
his neck at all times, even when walking on the street, even
when drinking beer at the bar, even when urinating at
night from the doorway of his room out onto the sidewalk.

He was dressed at all times in a tailored suit. By ap-
pearance he could have been a doctor except for the
theatricalness of that stethoscope. Nor do I think he could
have been a German agent. But he could have been crazy,
so crazy that even the pro-Germans would not have wanted
him working for them.

When I asked him for the third time to repeat his name,
preparing myself for a later check-up, he quickly mumbled
a string of syllables which made little sense either in Ger-
man, Spanish, English or Greek, for that matter.

Later, at my first opportunity in the capitol of La Paz,
I did report him, or at least the description of him. Yes,

70 THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL

he already was known as a character who had been roaming
the southern half of the peninsula, accepting money as a
doctor wherever he could. But he couldn't stay in one place
long, it seems. Two unnecessary deaths already had been
attributed to his surgeon's skill. And besides as I got it
later from a Mexican officer in La Paz this el senor Doctor
was fond of boys.

"Why, then, don't you do something about him?" I asked.

"But you see, sir, how can we? He's gone away from La
Paz. He's gone north."

CHAPTER 8

BETWEEN Santa Rosalia and Mulege the beauty of the Gulf-
shore begins in earnest; and one is glad to see a big body of
water again. The last glimpse of ocean had been days and
days ago on the Pacific side, along the approach to Rosario;
and again a distant sight of it near the old Mission of San
Xavier. But after that, until reaching Santa Rosalia, the
road had been the dusty ups and downs of the volcanic
earth.

The sameness can be boring after a time. Or else it will
end too abruptly altogether, and without warning; as when
we hit the Canyon of the Devil between San Ignacio and
Santa Rosalia. This canyon, for its steepness and depth, re-
minds one a little of the Grand Canyon except that the
Canyon of the Devil has no warning signposts to pro-
claim it.

One comes upon the Canyon of the Devil by surprise,
and there it is, a semi-dry creek bed way down at the bottom
of it. There is no alternative but to get down somehow,
across somehow, and up the other side somehow. Beauty
under such circumstances is not so readily appreciated
and this feeling must have been shared by our covered-
wagon boys of long ago as they crossed the virgin Rockies.

Today, while driving through our own mountains on
paved highways, we think: "Ah, I would like to have seen
all this when it was still wild, when it still had its untouched
timber, when there were no houses or towns around." But

71

72 THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL

a trip through Lower California can, I think, rid us high-
way-spoiled children of that error. We are not so ready to
think of Nature's beauty, as the poets call it, when every
yard of headway is a problem. We do not have the time or
the spirit to say: "Ah, me, oh, my isn't this lovely," when
our route ahead is plugged with boulders.

So I suppose this must have been the attitude of the
boys of old with their exploring wagons.

The name of the canyon does not tell much by way of
description. Anywhere in these wilds of Lower California,
when one is uncertain about the name of a place, he needs
but use the word diabhj and he is apt to have the title at
least half correct. The word has lost its thunder, or its
warning, by overuse. But of all the other names which
are overused in Lower California, especially names for
hills, a person does learn to develop a certain fondness for
the Spanish equivalent of "Squaw Tit Mountain." There
are a lot of these mountains, too, although one rather
doubts they were named by the ancient- padres.

We drove down into the Canyon of the Devil. The road
itself, being so near the efficient Santa Rosalia, has been
engineered. But in such a way that our truck could not
make the many turns without first being pushed ahead to
the edge of the brink, then backed up, then forward, then
backwards. I still don't know the secret of Mexican driving.
They may have a trick for such turns which the rest of us
do not know. Also, as the cliff-defying road is one way, it's
essential not to put one's whole trust in God that no car
may be coming from the opposite direction. Sensible driv-
ers peer out over the cliff -sides at each turn for any tell-tale
signs of dust from the invisible turns below.

THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL 73

Even at that, on seeing any signs o rising dust, I hardly
know what one could do about it. There are no turn-offs.

But I do know that never again will I smugly smile at
the antiquity of the Mexican cars, which for years back I
have seen trundling their way, overloaded, into Ensenada
or Tijuana from the back-country. The older the car, the
more high-slung the car, the better chance it has of getting
along. A modern touring car of today's vintage would have
its undersides torn off on the first boulder or stump-cactus.
Our specially equipped truck was pretty heavy, but it at least
was high-slung. My guess is that the Army jeeps, when this
war is over, will be just the thing for Lower California.
Six soldiers can lift them out of bog-holes or sand-holes, I
understand; which means perhaps that a combined Mexi-
can family, babies and grandfathers included, could lift
one, too.

We drove on. We drove in and out of the Canyon of the
Devil; and into Santa Rosalia.

Santa Rosalia is the one industrial town of Lower Cali-
fornia. And the ugliest.

And perhaps, right now, the most important to the
United States. Santa Rosalia is a copper-mining town.

The ore from Santa Rosalia is shipped to Tacoma, Wash-
ington for refining. The mining company itself, La Com-
pania del Boleo, is French. Yet most of the money sent into
Santa Rosalia to meet the monthly payrolls must first be
okayed by the United States. The whole setup at Santa
Rosalia, during these days of stress, is confusing.

My belief is that Santa Rosalia, halfway down the Gulf
Coast, may step out one of these days into international
importance. The town was important during the last war.

74 THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL

Some German vessels were there at the time, and they
were scuttled by their German crews. It was all quite a
mixup. But, then, Santa Rosalia itself is all quite a mixup.

There is little that's Mexican about the town, except the
Mexicans. They are the laborers o the copper mines.
Mexicans appear utterly incongruous moving in droves to
the sound o a whistle. Their wooden houses are factory-
built, standardized in efficient rows. The constant soot from
the giant smokestack has cast a grimy cloud over the town.
Nothing is bright there, and nothing out of order. It's an
efficient company town, and the Mexicans appear sadly
comic trying to live in this standardized way.

Mexicans appear in harmony with themselves in the
fields, or leisurely traveling the roads, under the sun. I
watched hundreds of them here moving in droves at the
midday whistle, and I didn't seem to be in Mexico at all.
I could have been in Butte. I didn't want to stay long. I
have seen dozens of Santa Rosalias in our own country. I
was anxious to get out of town into Mexico again.

There's not much history to Santa Rosalia beyond the
usual story of Big Business making a go of it on a bleak
coast. The harbor itself is an artificial one, but sheltered
somewhat by the near-by brown baked island of San
Marcos.

The piped-in water of Santa Rosalia is remarkably good
water. I am told that Santa Rosalia's health record, once
so bad, has been greatly improved in the interest of fac-
tory efficiency.

Guayinas, the well-known deep-sea fishing resort on
Mexico's mainland, is directly across the Gulf from Santa
Rosalia. A regular twice-a-week ferry connects the two

THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL 75

ports, perhaps the only certain schedule of sailings in the
whole of Lower California. Efficiency again. The trip takes
about ten hours each way.

An overland traveler can count on water and certain low
grades of gasoline in Santa Rosalia. Since there are excep-
tions to everything one says about Lower California, Santa
Rosalia is the outstanding exception in these matters. You
can buy almost any sort of simple canned goods and cloth-
ing.

But Santa Rosalia is not an oasis. The coppery soil is
dry and rocky. The roads immediately around it have been
engineered, and this is not typically Mexican, either. The
town has been in existence for about a half-century, and
most of its original capital came from Europe. It is said
that the French House of Rothschild had a share in financ-
ing the mines at the start.

Be that as it may, a lot of copper has been taken out, and
Santa Rosalia today is the anchor town of the whole Gulf
coast of the peninsula. It is interesting to note that Santa
Rosalia is the only important southern town which did not
start as a mission settlement. Its first church was actually
a prefabricated one, imported and set up. Copper has been
the town's patron saint, and tonnage its god.

Lower California's only railroad is here, a narrow-gauge
line which serves the mines. I am excepting, of course, the
Southern Pacific, which dips below the border for a few
miles between Yuma and San Diego.

The foreign quarter there is one is situated on a hill
overlooking the town and the Gulf. The few French, Eng-
lish, and visiting Americans mostly live up there in a
clubhouse-hotel with a weathered balcony. Mexican work-

76 THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL

men have their own standardized section, as I have said.
The other Mexican families live scattered about on the
fringes. On the hilly road out of town to the south, I saw
a lot of new Mexican shacks surrounded by the usual Mexi-
can babies. These shacks, too, were of wood, not adobe as
in all other Lower California towns.

I have often wondered why the Mexicans of Lower Cali-
fornia don't grow more vegetables. Even in modern Santa
Rosalia there was a sad lack of green truck, though the
mining company maintains one distant garden. The harsh
soil of the neighborhood may not be suitable for vegetable
gardening; but north and south of the town, within a few
hours' hauling distance, are two districts with rich soil,
San Ignacio and Mulege. Parra, our Mexican truckman,
carried sacks and sacks of potatoes along with our gaso-
line drums. He told us they were the largest regular freight
item on each trip. The potatoes are grown in the United
States, near the Mexican border, and carted 800 miles to
Santa Rosalia. So we could have bought potatoes in Santa
Rosalia at a fancy price to pay for carting them hundreds
of miles through valleys as capable of growing them as
where they came from. When we know why Lower Cali-
fornians prefer trucking potatoes 800 miles over mountain
trails to growing their own, we may have part of the answer
to the riddle of Lower California the unused, waiting
land.

As we left the town, climbing the steep cliff road to the
south, we came upon a tiny Mexican girl and an old rnan,
standing at the edge of the road waiting for our truck to
pass. The old man held the child's hand; she seemed fright-
ened at our approach. I wanted to stop and give the tiny

THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL 77

girl something; but we were on a dangerous grade and
couldn't stop. As we drew near I could see that the old man's
eyes were milky and blind. The little girl was leading him
down to Santa Rosalia. In her free hand she carried a fist-
ful of yellow flowers which looked like buttercups. She
had been gathering them as she slowly guided the old man
down into the copper inferno.

That afternoon we skirted along the Gulf all the way
to Mulege. The ancient village, with all of its date palms
and its shadowy salt-water lagoon, is a town of the malaria
mosquito. Without them it would be a perfect little place.
The lagoon, lined with its palms and its mangroves, ex-
tends broadside along the village, and a person almost
wishes he could live there forever. But he'd better not try
it. He'd better, for that matter, not stay there overnight
unless he first has prepared his body with quinine doses
something we had not done.

There were boats and dugout canoes in the shady lagoon,
and we saw one fisherman put-put-putting his way out to
sea with his outboard-motor attached to the bow of the
boat, pulling him along instead of pushing him. I would
like to have asked him the reason for this turn-about in-
novation, but he was beyond range of my voice, and it was
none of my business anyhow.

I bought limes and dates from an old man there in
Mulege. He was out in the yard drying dates on a mat when
we came along. An old woman worked beside him. I asked
him for limes, or rather for "little lemons/' from the near-by
tree; and he and the women went and picked as many as they
could carry. When I asked "how much?*' in Spanish the
old man shook his head. He didn't expect anything, an

78 THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL

answer which always makes me pay three times more than
if they try to bargain. I put the money into the old man's
hand, and he stood staring at the coins with an astonished
expression, as if they had landed there from a tree. He was
still staring at them when I left.

Across the street from the junglelike orchard four young
Mexicans were soldering oil-cans full of shark livers for
shipment. The shark liver, you understand, is full of vita-
mins. We had, then, for the first time come face-to-face with
the Gulfs major industry of today. From now on, through-
out the rest of Lower California, we were never far from the
evidence of this industry. Wherever we came within range
of the Gulf shoreline, from then on, we were to see shark-
hunters, or the skin and bones of their camps.

A fisherman does not necessarily have to own a canoe or
a boat to fish these sharks. They can be caught by casting
a line from shore. Indeed, it is almost as if the sharks them-
selves wish to co-operate in the furthering of their sudden
new importance.

Along the road, for instance, we stopped once beside a
farmer boy who was returning to his farm from the beach.
From his small hand dangled four shark livers. He had been
down to the beach casting out from shore with a huge home-
made hook, too crude to be believed. His fishline was a
rope. When I asked him in Spanish what he used for bait,
his answer was: "Oh, anything, sir/'

Here for the first time we camped directly on the shore of
the Gulf. Not knowing the course of the road ahead, we

had made camp in the best spot we could find quickly

just before complete darkness. We were not lucky.

CHAPTER 9

ONLY ONCE In all our journey through Lower California
did we think it necessary to keep loaded guns by us as we
slept. This was a night at Concepcion Bay.

I will tell of the incident, not for the sake of melodrama,
but as an answer to a question often asked us on our re-
turn. The question goes something like this:

"What were the people like that you met on the roads?
Aren't some of them dangerous? Didn't you carry guns?"

We had guns, all right. But, as I have said before, these
guns were solely for collecting specimens for both the
Natural History Museum of San Diego and the Natural
History Museum of Mexico City. The agreement called
for all new specimens to be divided equally between the
two museums, whether plants or birds or animals. The
various guns always were within easy reach inside the truck,
but they were always carried unloaded.

To be riding along through the wilderness with our guns
unloaded may seem a strange idea to hunters. But, to em-
phasize it again, the two naturalists were not killer-hunters.
They were collectors, as skilled in their line of work as
anybody I know. They knew how to load and shoot rapidly
whenever they saw a specimen they needed. But they did
not just go along shooting at everything that flew, such as
quail, or everything that ran, such as bobcats or coyotes.
This would have been a foolish course for them, for the
shots might frighten some specimen further on which they

79

8O THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL

really did want.

Besides, each specimen required its special type of shells
or shot. The wrong sort might do too much damage to
the collector's item. The skulls, most important for measur-
ing, must not be ruined.

Another very good reason for carrying the guns empty
is the constant jarring from the rocks. This has been known
to irritate a loaded gun and make it act up. The shaking,
it is said, has occasionally discharged a gun even when it
was uncocked. A collector's abandoned car down there
served for a long time as evidence of this. He had been rid-
ing along with his loaded gun strapped alongside the seat
in such a way that the muzzle was aimed at the motor.

When the car hit a succession of rocks the gun went off;
the cartridge ricocheted back and forth through the motor
and made quite a mess of it. The engine died instantly,
never again to be started. He was two hundred miles or
more from the nearest place where he could hope to find
repair parts. To have hired the car towed out over those
ugly roads would have cost a fortune, even if towing would
have been possible, which is doubtful. So he took what he
wanted out of the old high-slung model, had the stuff carried
to the main road by burro; and in time the abandoned car
became just another of the skeletons that mark the roads
of the peninsula. He had learned his lesson about traveling
with a loaded gun.

There have been times in the past, usually during revolu-
tions, when travelers in Lower California needed to be wary
about meeting strangers on the i"oad. But today such meet-
ings are more a pleasant event, a cheerio, than something to
be avoided. Passing cars are so rare that when they do meet,

THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL 8l

the passengers frequently get out, have a big talk, perhaps
pass the bottle, and inquire about the conditions of the
road ahead.

Days might pass when no cars at all are seen. And usually
only the most experienced of the Mexican drivers ever try
those roads at night. In the interior a night camp could
be pitched right across the road, so far as that goes. For
most of the Mexican drivers (and we must hand it to them)
usually stop when they see a halted car, night or day. They
get out and ask if there is any trouble. They get out to ask
if the cause could be tires or gasoline or what. Or they get
out just to talk and maybe, as I said, to have a drink.

In Lower California we are certainly Iboking at our own
Old West, the days when everybody was willing to help
a traveler in difficulty. We are in the days before professional
hitch-hikers, or other exploiters of kindness, destroyed
human faith and a natural desire to help. The travelers
in the depths of Lower California, the Mexicans as well
as the very few Americans living there, still have this faith.
It's a nice thing to see.

Only once, then, during all our journey on the peninsula,
did we feel the necessity of being on watch at night. Ironi-
cally, too, it happened in the most peaceful section of the
Gulf shore, at Concepci6n Bay.

We had made camp hurriedly by the side of the road,
just as darkness caught us. It was a quiet night; the only
sounds were the little splashes made by fish, and now and
then a distant coyote. All at once a earful of young drunks
broke upon us from Mulege. They asked for gasoline, a lot
of it.

We said no. They did not need any.

82 THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL

They then began demanding it. They were on their way
to Comondu, they said, and would pay us back with gasoline
there. This promise, of course, was a drunken lie. It was
obvious, too, that they had started from Mulege on their
joy ride. If gasoline was their problem, they could easily
have returned the few miles to Mulege.

We said: "If you need gas to get back to Mulege we'll
give it to you. But not for Comondu. " Cornondu would
be an all-night trip for them.

They were god-awful drunk, eight of them, packed in-
side the little car. Now they began tumbling out, one after
another, to argue with us. They carried their open bottles
with them, a bottle to a man, it seemed. They wobbled
their way to a position in front of us. They would have
our gasoline. They would have as much of it as they wanted
from our special storage-tank.

The fact there were eight of them and three of us made
it an ugly situation for us. Whether any of them had guns
or knives, I don't know. If I wanted to make a scare-story
out of it, I could try to show through them, perhaps, how
one is never safe on meeting strangers in Lower California.
Yet what a lie that would be. And how ashamed of this
drunken group would be all the other Mexicans I had en-
countered on the road of Lower California. That is the
point.

This group was composed of town-smart hoodlums, the
worst type in all Mexico, and they were dressed in town
clothes. We have thousands of young Americans like them
in the towns and cities on our own side of the border; the
kind who steal tires and gasoline from our parked cars, or
else steal the cars outright. Or who put guns into the faces

THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL 83

of parked couples.

Yes, here was the familiar type, even in Lower California.
But what amazed me afterward, on thinking it over, was
the small proportion of them in the population. This had
been our only experience. I don't mean to say that Mexi-
cans don't steal. There are Mexicans, the same as Ameri-
cans, who will steal for the perverse joy of stealing. A car,
if left in the open, unguarded, in Lower California, is
likely soon to be a stripped car, just as on our side of the
border.

The group continued demanding our gasoline, and we
kept on refusing. But all of us, arguing it out there in the
beams of their headlights and our camp lantern, must have
made strange shadows on the beautiful shore of Concepcion.
They could not speak English, and we pretended at first
not to know any Spanish.

We argued for a long time, perhaps an hour. We told
them we had no gasoline, that this was the reason we had
stopped. We told them a lot of things, getting our stories
all crossed. But their arguments were r" nrazy as our own.
They had to get to a dance that night in Comondu. But,
we pointed out, they couldn't possibly reach Comondu till
late morning. Well, then, they had to get to Comondu on
business, most important business. Well, if the business
was so important, they should have loaded up with enough
gasoline before starting from Mulege. Well, they had ^oaded
up. But it might not be enough. Something had gone wrong
with their tank. It leaked. Well, then, if it leaked there
was no use putting more into it. Well . . . well . . . well
. . . I really should have kept count of the numerous
"wells" during that hour.

84 THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL

"Listen you!" the leader finally said, pointing at me.
"We'll go a little ways now. We'll have another drink to
think it over and then "

"And then are we to expect you back?" I asked.

"Why not? There's a lot of night left in tonight."

We were of much the same opinion. There was still a
lot of night left in tonight. The eight of them squeezed
back into their car. We watched them go, heading straight
for the dangerous curves on the cliff road to Comondu.

Within another few minutes either they were going to
become very, very drunk or very, very dead. Maybe both.
That night we slept with guns.

There are no sounds at Concepcion Bay except natural
sounds, the splashing of fish, the calling of birds, the crying
of coyotes and lions at night. Still without human habita-
tion, Concepci6n Bay is much as it was when it was dis-
covered by the Spaniards more than three hundred years
ago. .

Only at that time there were more people around there
than now.

Indians were there then, somewhat different from the
rest of the Indians on the peninsula in that the women did
not wear the customary skirts of rabbit or deerskin. The
women around Concepci6n Bay did not, in fact, wear any-
thing.

I suppose I am not the only one who has dreamed of
someday arriving in a land of naked women. Nor am I the
only one who has been perpetually disappointed in this
regard. When I looked at the gently sloping beaches of
Concepci6n, and its dreamy inlets, it did seem as if life
at one time could have been worth while. And pants a

THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL 85

mockery. Naturally, though, such dreams do not include
the cactus, the perpetual cactus which is absent nowhere
on the peninsula, not even at Concepcion.

Of all the cacti in Lower California, the trap cactus,
which abounds here, is the trickiest, the meanest, the wisest,
and most obscene. It has a way of coming alive when your
back is turned, and stabbing you just where you wish your
trousers were made of battleship-steel. I had my most serious
encounter with trap cactus here on beautiful Concepci6n
Bay.

Ordinary cactus, as we know, is evil enough. One learns
to give it a wide berth, not to hurry over unfamiliar ground,
and not to "attack" it. But you don't have to attack trap
cactus to make it sore. It just doesn't like people. All of
its roots do not go underground. I canfiot say if any of
them do. At any rate, the exposed roots entwine themselves
in a rough circle on the surface of the ground. They are
partly concealed by leaves and twigs, and that is the shame
of it. The roots serve as a trigger-spring to the main bush.
By stepping on one of these hidden roots, an unsuspecting
man can set the whole fiery plant in action.

It isn't the long cactus-needles that hurt so much; it's
the sheathes around the needles. The sheathes slide off and
stay in the flesh. These pain-poisoned darts seem to make
for the part of a man's body which he cannot see very well.
Around Copcepci6n this trap cactus comprises, I think,
the greatest sermon I have ever encountered against nudity.
Neither Carrie Nation nor the Pope could have done better.

The mystery, then, is how those naked Indian ladies got
along. Maybe they never left the gentle sands of the beaches,
but just lived, bred, and ate their fish there.

86 THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL

Our camp was within a few yards of the shore. By the
word "camp," I do not mean that we pitched a tent. A
tent is a silly thing to pitch in Lower California except
during a long rain. Actually a camp is no more than a
stopping place. The folding cots and the sleeping bags
are unloaded, and the food rations. Cots are essential as
a safeguard against rattlesnakes. Light canvas folding chairs
are convenient, too. At night they can be placed at the head
of the cot to hold clothes and shoes. Because of snakes and
other things, it's not quite smart to put one's clothes on
the ground. Nor is it wise to put your feet smack on the
ground, on getting up, without first looking to see what
may be down there under the cot.

The sleeping bags are unrolled upon the cots, and there
you are, all snug for the night, unless you happen to be
with naturalists. They are hard-working people. They are
so fanatically absorbed with the earth that at times they
seem to be completely off of it.

Our camp-lantern was not so much to give light as to
attract flying insects. "Ah/' the collectors would say. "Look
at that fellow! It's one I want." The pursuit would begin
around the lantern, and the insect would end its brief span
within a bottle of poisonous fumes. Hour after hour this
would go on until it was time again to make a round of
the trapline.

A trapline would be exciting if it were baited for lions,
we will say, or wildcats, or possibly for the smartest animal
of all, the coyote. But these traps were set for kangaroo-
rats mostly, for kangaroo-mice, and gophers. They were
usually put out in a wide circle of perhaps half-a-mile, be-
ginning and ending at the camp. One of the naturalists

THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL 87

would pick up the bagful of specially made little traps and
start walking. Wherever he placed a trap, baiting it with
a sprinkle of oatmeal, he would tie a strip of white cloth
to the bush above. The idea was to have these strips within
sight of each other so that the collector, by flashlight at
night, could know exactly where to go next.

(There was one time, though, near a village, when a
curious burro followed the trapline far behind the trapper
and ate all the white strips from the bushes. The collector
had an awful time trying to collect his traps that night.)

To my unskilled eye a kangaroo-rat is a kangaroo-rat,
and when I have seen one I have seen them all. Of course
I'm wrong. There are several varieties, recognized by meas-
uring their delicate skulls. The skulls are cleaned out by
an atomizer, and measured; then they're all hung on a
single string to dry. There's a lot of bookkeeping connected
with it. Tabulations must be kept, not only of the sizes,
but also of which skull goes with which stuffed body. And
it's later maybe a year later back in the workroom of the
Museum that the collector knows, through comparisons,
whether he's really found a new species. Personally, I
couldn't stand the awesome suspense. How could I answer
people who meanwhile might ask: "Miller, don't you know
by this time whether or not you found a new rat? Answer
yes or no."

To show me how life-important it all is to them, one of
the hard-working naturalists told me of his most harrow-
ing hours. I supposed it was going to be the story of a time
when he had found himself wounded on a desert and with-
out water. In his years of trapping he had had more than
his share of physical hardships, I knew.

88 THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL

But his most painful recollection is of a time when, near-
ing San Diego after a trapping trip in Arizona, he suddenly
remembered he had left a string of rat-skulls drying on a
bush in Arizona. Without waiting for food or sleep he
turned around and drove the 800 miles back to the moun-
tainous spot in Arizona. He drove it in a panic.

"I found them," he said. "Yes, I found them. But I never
want to go through that scare again."

By the time we had reached Concepcion Bay, I had seen
all the measuring, skinning, and stuffing of rats and mice
I wanted to see. My way out was to drag my sleeping bag
into the shadows, away from the insect-collecting camp-
lantern. There I would lie on my back and try to find the
Big Dipper. It's the only collection of stars I can recognize
for sure.

Then, after finding the Big Dipper, or something that
resembled it enough to satisfy me, I would go to sleep. Or
I would lie there listening to the night sounds of the desert-
jungle. This had been my routine on the road to Con-
cepci6n, and I was becoming quite satisfied with it. But
the conscientious naturalists were always trying to blow
up in me a spark of interest in their work with rats and
plants and bugs. It was at Concepci6n that one of the
naturalists, using a combination of interests, did get me
aroused.

He had been running his trapline by flashlight, and had
come across a kangaroo-rat caught in a trap. The interest-
ing thing was that a rattlesnake was trying to swallow both
the trap and the rat. This was an ambitious feat, and a
tough one. The rattlesnake, though not discouraged, was
choking slightly.

THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL 89

The naturalist gathered up snake and all in his bare
hands, and returned to the camp-lantern. The rattlesnake,
very much alive, continued its wiggling and buzzing while
the two naturalists discussed whether all this was interest-
ing enough to warrant waking me. I had been asleep. Now
I was half-asleep. As I dozed there in the nether-world, their
long discussion had the effect of a senseless nightmare.

Much as I appreciated their interest, I rather hoped, in
my semi-conscious state, that they would not do it. But as
words wouldn't come to me, I lay there utterly helpless.
It was all up to them.

Apparently the two naturalists finally decided against the
idea. For the rattlesnake did not come. But after I had gone
to sleep again, the rattlesnake came several times, still carry-
ing the trap as if wanting to present it to me.

My impressions of the truly beautiful Concepcion Bay,
then, are all mixed up with trap cactus, with traps, with
things carrying traps, and with eight visiting drunks in a car.
I remember most clearly the shadows, the stark hills, the
leaping fish, and a canoe of shark-fishermen of an evening
far off from shore, almost on the other side of the bay. The
shadows on the evening waters may have made these fisher-
men appear more interesting than they actually were. I
hoped that with the coming darkness they would beach
their canoe where we were camped.

But they didn't. They landed on a neck of sand at least
four miles away, and afterward in the night I heard their
dog barking at coyotes. The fishing camp, then, wasn't just
a temporary one, since they'd brought a dog. They might
have been Seris over from the famed Island of Tiburon.
The silhouette of their canoe, at a distance, resembled a

gO THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL

Seri canoe.

Concepcion Bay has remained much in my mind, perhaps
because it has changed so little since the days of the first-
comers. Since the days, for instance, when Padre Ugarte,
the muscular priest, built a boat near here, the first sea-
going vessel to be built in Lower California. With her the
Padre explored the whole Gulf, clear up to the mouth of
the Colorado. Padre Ugarte was a great fellow. I must tell
about him. He didn't mind trap cactus. He didn't mind
rattlesnakes. But I am not so sure about the naked women.

CHAPTER 10

THE GULF o California has been called by many names.
The Spanish explorers, a jealous group, had the habit of
renaming places if they didn't like the man who had been
before them or if a more picturesque title struck their
fancy. Besides, for many years, no one knew for sure whether
Lower California was a peninsula or an island.

During the years of confusion the Gulf bore such names
as: Sea of Cortez, Gulf of Cortez, or, in Spanish, Mar Rojo,
Mar Vermiglion, Mar Laurentano, Seno California, Mar
Vermijo, and even Mar California. The present Golfo de
California did not come into accepted use until the Jesuits
made it stick. Among those who had most to do with prov-
ing that it is a gulf was Padre Ugarte, the great sailor-priest.

Ugarte's name was Juan, and he was a remarkably husky
man. When the Jesuits planned to establish a new mission
in wild territory, Padre Ugarte was usually what we call
the "advance man." He was the scout and ground-breaker,
the one best able to make contact with a new tribe of In-
dians.

Old Father Salvatierra, the headman of the Jesuits in
Lower California, thought highly of Ugarte, and with rea-
son. For Ugarte was truly dauntless. If a new mission was
to be built in the farther wilderness, Ugarte made an ex-
ample out of himself by swinging the ax all day, carrying
the heaviest stones, and shoveling clay and mud. And all
the while he directed the enterprise.

91

g2 THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL

And at the same time he would set out to teach the
Catechism to the new Indian converts. It was tough going,
as neither, at first, knew the language o the other. As the
story is told, once the roughnecks among the Indians pre-
tended to be repeating after Ugarte, when in reality they
were reciting the liveliest o Indian dirty words. Then they
would roar with laughter at their own joke.

But on the day when Father Ugarte learned for sure what
the tougher element was doing, he put an end to the ribald
game right there in church, by grabbing the loudest-
mouthed warrior by the hair, holding him aloft by the
scalp, and shaking the hell out of him.

The rest of the congregation, terrified at such a muscular
turn of events, fled from the new church into the bush.
After a time of deliberation, the boldest among them re-
turned to the church. If Father Ugarte really wanted to
wrestle, said the bold one, the two of them might as well
start in; for the warrior proclaimed himself the best wrestler
of the tribe.

The other Indians stole back into the church to watch.

This was when Father Ugarte, with one of his amazingly
big hands, felt the arm muscles of the Indian as if to admire
them. But while admiring the muscles, Ugarte squeezed
them so hard that the Indian squealed.

"Ah," said Father Ugarte. "Anybody who cries over a
little thing like that is not fit to fight me/'

As time went along, Father Ugarte learned another trick
that was useful in teaching the Catechism. If ever the In-
dians tried again to make obscene sentences out of the Cate-
chism, he would snatch the two noisiest savages by the ears
and bump their heads together. But in all his career he

THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL g

never resorted to guns or bloodshed, nor to calling In the
soldiers.

So the Indians up and down the peninsula made a sort
of legend of Ugarte, because of his strength, his rough-
house qualities, and his scrupulous honesty with them.
Later, when Father Ugarte undertook to build a boat for
exploring the Gulf, the Indians were all with him. The
Indians knew nothing about building a boat, but they knew
where large enough timber grew in the distant hills, and
they snaked the logs down to him at the shore, near Con-
cepcion Bay. The distance from the timbered hill to the
shore was ninety miles.

More than four months were required for cutting and
lugging the timber; Father Ugarte swung an ax the day
through. A year was required for constructing the little
vessel. She carried upper decks, but was built without metal
of any sort. There is a general belief, and certainly a rea-
sonable one, that much of the wood was from the "cat's-
claw," a thorny tree which grows about fifteen feet tall.
When the wobbly little vessel was finished, she was chris-
tened Triunfo de la Cruz "Triumph of the Cross." And
in her Father Ugarte set out northward from the mouth of
Concepcion Bay and into the waters of mystery. The year
of the launching was 1719.

Today we hear little of the Gulf of California and prob-
ably consider it inconsequential. That is, unless we hap-
pen to be living on the west coast. The waters of the Gulf
are still full of navigational mysteries. The only available
charts are antique ones, fifty to seventy-five years old. They
are reprinted time and again and may look new; but the
dates on them are the give-away. (Unless the Japs have

94 THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL

thoughtfully brought them up to date.)

The Gulf has more than twelve hundred miles of over-
all shoreline. It penetrates deeper into the North American
continent than any other arm of the sea. Some day the Gulf
may become of startling importance, and I expect it will,
now with the war changing everything in the world. You
can't really picture the Gulfs size by looking at a map. I
had to be right there on the shore of the peninsula to realize
that the mainland of Mexico is another world, far off to
the east and out of sight. The distance across the entrance
between Cape San Lucas and the port of Mazatlan, is some-
thing like 250 miles.

And until I finally got the sense >f this distance pounded
into my head, I had a hard time understanding why the
boys of old had such difficulties sailing from the mainland
of Mexico to "the Isle of California.'* Some of the vessels
were three months trying to make it, others were two; and
some did not make it at all. They simply vanished from
sight. You had good or bad luck in the crossing, depend-
ing on the season of the year, the strength of the head winds,
and the roughness of the waters. The Gulf can be as sloppy
as any water in the world, with vicious currents. Strangely,
too, the farther north one sails into the Gulf, the worse
the currents become. The Gulfs many rocky islands have
a lot to do with this, as do the waters that pour down from
the Colorado River.

Today Boulder Dam serves as a man-made halter on the
Colorado flood-waters. But in the days of Ugarte, and long
afterwards, the Colorado meeting the incoming tides of
the Gulf resulted in walls of upstanding water, called bores.

THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL 95

It was an actual case of irresistible forces at work on each
other.

Father Ugarte was not the first man to try the headwaters
of the Gulf. A few other explorers Francisco de Ulloa,
for instance, had been there some two hundred years before
him. So, too, had Fernando de Alarcon in the time of Cortez.
These early skippers had found that the Gulf was actually
a gulf, that the Colorado River emptied into it, and that
Lower California was a peninsula.

But the people of those days, just like the people of today,
did not care to have their illusions dispelled. They wanted
to think of the Gulf, not as it was, but as an open channel
leading somewhere, perhaps to a heavenly land of gold
and easy women.

The public wasn't willing to accept the reports of honest
Father Kino, a century and more after Cortez, after he had
walked from Mexico's mainland around to the northern
top of the peninsula.

The Gulf is not wide at the northern end, but a walking
tour around it is difficult because of the great heat and
the sand-dunes. Yet Kino, poorly equipped as he was, had
accomplished it. And from the northern end of the penin-
sula he had looked back across to the mainland of Mexico
and seen the sun rising over it. This should have been
proof enough that California was not an island. Yet few
would take his word for it. His fellow-Jesuits alone believed
him. Salvatierra believed him. So did Ugarte.

There are high places today midway down the peninsula
from which, on exceptionally clear days, one can look across
the Gulf and see a high peak or two on the shadowy main-

96 THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL

land. Or from the mainland they sometimes can see a
shadowy horizon which is a lofty range on the peninsula.
I did not have that good luck, though, on my trip.

Ugarte, while struggling among the currents of the Sal
Si Puedes group of islands the Find Your Way Out If You
Can Islands almost didn't find his way out. The strong
man was stricken by a strange sickness. A fever made the
skin on his abdomen so tender that when he removed his
shirt the skin came off with the shirt. It may have been a
bad case of Gulf sunburn. In any case, he suffered greatly
and was so weak and dispirited that he very nearly let his
ship Triunfo de la Cruz go on the rocks of the Sal Si Peudes.

Fortunately, though, he recovered, and went on to visit
the much-maligned Seri Indians on Tiburon Island. His
record is one of the earliest accounts we have of these strange
people.

Tiburon Island, sandy, dry and desolate, is still their
native home, as it has been since prehistory. To them the
Gulf is the greatest body of water, the mother-of-all-waters,
the center of the world.

Ferocious as the Seris are reported to be, strangely enough
they did not slaughter Ugarte when he landed. Rather they
paraded the black-shirted man through the village, and, he
had to kiss the babies.

The more stories one hears about the Seri Indians, the
more confused one becomes. The Seri have been a topic of
argument for four hundred years. Even when I first came
to the water front of San Diego two decades ago, the fisher-
men were arguing about the subject. They probably still
are.

"The Seri once were cannibals."

THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL 7

"You're a liar. The Seri never were cannibals."

"I'm telling you, the Seri would as soon kill you today
if you landed unguarded on their precious island."

"Don't make me laugh, I've landed there, and the Seri
are the kindest and friendliest Indians you ever could hope
to meet."

"You've landed there? Well, so have I. And I'm here to
say they've degraded. Nothing but a bunch of lice-infested
beggars. They'll beg their eyes out for a safety-pin. And for
an empty oil-can you can have the chief's daughter."

"Listen, I've lived among them, and they're a happy peo-
ple. They catch all the food they can use. And they're proud
as hell. I've never seen a prouder people."

"Sure, they're proud, all right. I'll admit that. They're
so proud they think nothing of shooting you in the back.
They'll do it just to get your hat. Or your shoes. Don't tell
me anything about the Seri. I know all about them. How
about all the people who've been murdered on Tiburon?
Try to explain that!"

Because of the mystery surrounding it, Tiburon is the
best-known of the drab, sun-baked islands in the Gulf. It
is also the largest, some thirty miles long. It is one of the
few islands of the North American continent still inhabited
by its aborigines. These are the Seri. The tribe annually
establishes quarters near the village of Kino Bay, on the
mainland, which is within a hundred miles of the fair-sized
town of Hermosillo, Sonora. Except that we prefer arguing
about them to studying them, there would be no mystery
about the Seri. They belong as much to that part of the
mainland coast that lies between Punta Kino and Desem-
boque as to their own Island of Tiburon.

98 THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL

But the legend of their savagery is ancient and does not
die. Cabeza de Vaca, Spanish explorer, and Estevanico, his
Negro companion, are said to have encountered the Seri in
1539. They reported a race of giants seven feet tall, who
were to be avoided. This was nothing compared to the
later reports of one of the notable liars of all time, Friar
Marcos de Niza. Returning to Mexico from a brief trip
into the unexplored north, he set going many of the stories
about the fabulous Cities of Cibola. This pious but sus-
ceptible gentleman stated that the Seri were eight feet tall,
and their Amazon women guarded the gateway to the north-
ern riches.

There is a later tale of a company of Spanish soldiers
making a surprise landing on Tiburon at one of the tradi-
tional camps of the Indians, the spot now called Palo Ferro
on Little Hell Strait, just opposite the mainland. Most of
the men were away deer hunting, the story goes; and only
the women and a few male youngsters remained in camp. fc

Taken unawares, they quickly devised a stratagem. The
Seri women, like the men, are famous runners. Some of the
men are said to be able to run down, corner, and kill a
deer without a weapon. Knowing every foot of their island,
every rock and arroyo, the women threw a shower of stones,
then ran. They would stop again and throw stones, then
run again. Meanwhile the fastest runner crossed the island
to tell the men. By the time the women had lured the
Spaniards, burdened by their leather armor, deep into the
scorched interior, the Spaniards were pretty disgusted with
the whole thing. They had never seen women who could
run like that always just out of musket range.

Finally the women pretended to be trapped in a boxed

THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL 99

arroyo. The prey was cornered, and the soldiers, panting for
water after all that running, drooped on the ground to
rest. In sign language they started negotiations for a guide
to a water hole, and the Seri women, still just out of reach,
stipulated that only ten at a time should be led to water.
By this time the soldiers w r ere thirsty enough to fall for this
arrangement. So, by groups of ten, each behind a woman
guide, they were spirited away into ambush. In the protec-
tion of dusk the Seri men were waiting at pre-arranged
spots, and the result was a competent massacre.

It's probably much easier for us to think of the Seri as
savages still, whether they are or not. With so much savagery
in the most splendid capitals of the world, it makes us feel
better to point to the Seri with their pelican-worship and
say, "Ah, you're savages; we recognize you as such/'

The Seri, who consider their rocky, wind-swept isle the
navel of the earth, may not deserve their reputation for
treachery, but they have certainly not gone out of their
way to better it. In more recent times, there is the story
of the sloop Examiner, out of San Diego. Four men from
the sloop rowed ashore at Tiburon and asked by signs
whether they could land there. The chief signaled yes. Two
of the men started inland, and the other two stayed by the
skiff to watch her and talk to the chief. He was very friendly,
and indicated that he himself would get them a deer if
they would lend him a rifle. With the rifle he went inland,
waylaid the two Americans who had gone ahead, and shot
one dead. The other ran back toward the shore, but was
chased into an arroyo and killed with rocks.

The two on the shore escaped to the sloop and brought
the story back to San Diego. It lived on until a bigger one

100 THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL

supplanted It. In 1909 the entire Grindell party was killed
on Tiburon, and it is said that the hands and feet of the
victims were posted on poles along the shore to warn would-
be visitors away. I can't vouch for this part of it, but San
Diego fishermen swear they saw the poles,

Henry Johnson, who had gone to the island looking for
rare shells with Captain George Porter, was killed there;
and there have been others. The reputation of the Seri made
it easy for Mexican officials to blame everything on them.
The murder of two lost fliers from San Diego's North Is-
land was, of course, credited to the Seri. The two airmen,
Lieutenant Cecil B. Connelly and Lieutenant Frederick
Waterhouse, were flying border patrol from North Island
one day in August 1919. The weather was milky, and fly-
ing instruments in those days were not what they are now.
The fliers were confused by the weather and got their direc-
tions mixed. They thought they were flying north toward
San Diego, when in reality they were going south along
the eastern shore of Lower California. Out of gas, they
landed on the Gulf -side beach of the peninsula. They had
no food, and no drinking water except the rusty water from
the radiator. They kept alive on crabs and mussels, but
they grew too weak to walk.

On the seventeenth day they sighted the first people they
had seen, supposedly two Seris, going by in a canoe. The
fliers signaled the Seris to come ashore, and they landed.
They bundled the feeble fliers into the canoe and paddled
them toward the Bahia de Los Angeles, on the peninsula
exactly opposite Tiburon. They put the men ashore on
the sand and left, then later came back and killed them
with rocks. They took their money and clothing.

THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL IOI

The story was later pieced together, partly from a diary
whittled on the fuselage of the plane by the fliers, and partly
from evidence obtained by the destroyer Aaron Ward, which
brought the bodies to San Diego.

So it goes. One is convinced of the savage treachery of
the Seri, then along comes an example of their humanity
to offset it. During this present war, for instance, when both
shores of Lower California and the islands of the Gulf as
well are patrolled daily by military planes from San Diego,
one of these planes made a forced landing smack on Ti-
buron. The Seri not only treated the pilot well, but helped
him as much as they could.

In large part the bad reputation of the Seri, particularly
the charge of cannibalism, is the work of Mexican ranchers
who have been trying for a hundred years to get the use of
the Seri land free. But the Seri have survived all accusa-
tions, and combatted sporadic physical assaults with their
own brand of guerrilla warfare. Today they are a small,
hardy tribe, numbering perhaps 150, and they still have
the use of their coastal mainland and Tiburon Island for
their wanderings. Recently not more than ten years ago
the Mexican Government took a hand, and now the Seri are
protected by the Government and aided in co-operative
fishing enterprises. Expert boatmen, they range far down
the Gulf in canoes in search of the new manna from heaven
shark livers. The bloody legends about them may die out
under this protection.

Periodically they return to Tiburon, their homeland,
where is the holy cave which gives access to the under-
world. The men who paddle canoes across the treacherous
strait wear their hair long, below the shoulders, are tattooed

1O2 THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL

within an Inch of their lives, and sport bright aprons over
their trousers, a reminder of the days when the aprons were
made of pelican skins. The women are slender, thin-hipped
and loose-jointed like the men, and they carry little boxes
of trinkets which correspond to vanity cases.

Their sacred festivals involve much face-painting and
the use of fetishes against evil. Their old religious customs
are practically unaffected by Christianity, for there has
never been a mission on Tiburon.

It is hard to think of this island, with its blazing heat,
two ranges of rocky hills, and only one year-round spring,
as desirable to anybody. But to the Seri it is paradise. There
are deer there, the giant sea turtles come in season, and the
delectable fruit of the pitahaya grows there.

Most of the many desolate islands of the Gulf lack water,
and people have seldom tried to live on them. Once in a
great while someone starts a mine on one of them, but
sooner or later it goes back to sea birds, ground animals,
and rattlesnakes. I think Tiburon, the only one with in-
habitants and a history, has grown in legend through four
centuries for want of competition. And because it is sur-
rounded by particularly difficult waters and peopled by a
folk determined to remain unmolested, it has never yielded
the familiarity which dispels fables.

CHAPTER ii

NOT UNTIL recently have the Lower Calif omians attempted
to build a road from Concepclon Bay southward to the
inland town o Comondu, where a rocky range of cliffs
makes an effective natural barrier between the northern
part of the peninsula and the southern.

Southbound vehicles, with effort, could get as far as
Mulege, or perhaps slightly beyond, to the first glimpse
of Concepcion Bay. But it would have taken more than
effort, more than faith, to have gotten them around the
cliff barriers of Concepcidn and onto the road southward.
For the cliffs along part of Concepcidn descend in almost
straight drops, and for some reason they kept reminding
me of an old illustration I once saw of the Prison of Chilot.
The reprint, as I recall, used to hang in our fourth-grade
room in the Garfield school, Everett, Washington.

Now a miracle has happened; the Mexicans have actually
blasted out a one-way road. The road is a ledge. Its turns
are so sharp that our truck had to be maneuvered delicately
to get around each of them. We would have to back up,
then go forward, back up again, then go forward, all the
while gritting our teeth in sacrilegious prayer that no ve-
hicle was coming north against us. If this had ever hap-
pened, I truly do not know how our heavy truck would
have gotten out of it. This twisting ledge road, with all its
dizzy drops, was the route which the carload of drunks,

103

lt>4 THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL

that night near Mulege, had faced so blithely, after leav-
ing us.

There is, of course, a special deity that looks out for
drunken Mexicans. At any rate, we saw no signs that the
drunks had gone over the ledge. The secret of drunken
Mexican drivers is, I think, simply to assume they are on
a burro. Give'r the rein, and the car will find her way some-
how.

In this connection I remember somewhere on the trip
coming upon two Mexicans dead asleep in their ancient
car. The time was late morning. From the looks of things
they had been returning from an all-night dance. When
sleep overtook them, the car, like a weary burro, stopped
of its own accord. And it happened to be in the middle of
the road. This would have been all right except that It
was a one-way road, and their car had to be moved before
I could get by. I was driving alone at the time, not in the
truck, but in another car.

I walked over to the Mexican's auto and tried to awaken
the driver. No luck. He seemed dimly aware that something
was disturbing him, but it was only a dream. The key was
still in the switch. I tried shoving the driver over to one
side of the seat so that I might get into his car and back
it up myself. His body was too relaxed. Every inch I gained
by shoving him, I immediately lost again. I'd push and he'd
flop back my direction a little more. Finally he flopped all
the way over so that his face was resting where I wanted to
sit. So I sat on it, since there was no alternative and time
was getting short.

There is a certain awkwardness about driving a stranger's
car while perched high on the owner's face. There is some

THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL 105

difficulty, too, In reversing the hand-gearshift when it is
entangled with his legs. But I did it, and, I think, rather
well. I would like to have had somebody around to compli-
ment nie. I backed his car around the nearest bend, where
there was room to get two of the wheels off the road onto
a patch of safe adobe. This allowed me my own passage if I
was careful. And I was.

As I wiggled past the two sleeping Mexicans I could not
help envying them in their great unconcern with the
troubles of the world. Theirs is the life.

The road between Concepcion Bay and Comondu is
much the most varied one on the peninsula. Here in a
single stretch you have all the variety of Lower California.
You have your first close view of the Gulf you actually
splash through its salty waters in one section you climb
to dizzy mountain heights, and drop steeply again into
desert valleys.

I had hoped to do a lot of swimming in the Gulf before
leaving it for the interior. But my efforts were extremely
sissified. No girl of the Nineties, in her voluminous skirts,
could have put on a more delicate demonstration of water-
shyness. It was because I did not know what sort of water
I was in. It was certainly full of surprises even when I was
in only knee-deep. The water was flashing with fins, big
and little, streaking so close to shore that their owners must
have been running on the bottom. Myriads of smaller fish
scooted under my legs as if for protection. I could feel them,
I could see them, and I didn't especially like all the larger
things which were chasing them. I can't honestly say all
of them were sharks. But I stayed in close to shore in shame.

I am not one to argue whether or not sharks will ever bite

1O6 THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL

a man. I'm all through arguing on that subject, for I know
they will. Through the evidence of our own tuna-fishermen
at home, I know that a blood-excited shark will bite any-
thing, the fishermen's rubber boots included. It matters
not that some of those fins may not have been sharks, greatly
excited, exceptionally hungry, or merely peaceful sharks,
still with the market as it is today I would prefer to
have their livers than allow them an opportunity of having
mine.

But none of this side-talk is getting our truck from Con-
cepci6n Bay to Comondu verily the prize town of all the
peninsula. I'll let the rest of the world take Santa Rosalia,
San Ignacio, Mulege, and certainly La Paz (coming up),
if only the rest of the world will concede me Comondu.
Little, hidden Comondu, the mountain-snuggled hamlet
which, if given my choice, I would wish to visit first on
going back.

Comondu, hidden these several centuries within the
Sierra de la Giganta, is a delicate little sermon on the art
of minding one's own business. The villagers are self-sus-
taining. They have their own dates, their own sugarcane,
their own figs, their own grapes, and the best mountain
water in all the land. We may call such people rustics if
we like, but they do have the answer to something.

Comondu is one of those unspoiled little Mexican vil-
lages which can make an American feel gross and awkward,
no matter what he does. The villagers do not especially
want the pesos that the visitor has to spend. The children
are untrained in the art of begging.

The name Comondu includes the whole valley, not
merely the village. There are, in fact, two adjoining vil-

THE LA;\ 7 D WHERE TIME STANDS STILL 10 J

lages In Comondu; one called San Miguel de Comondu,
the other San Jose de Comondu. We were at San Jos de
Comondu, the first, the oldest, the one with the mission.

But I was not to know much about Comondu until morn-
ing.

The village was already shaded in darkness when our
truck finally descended the last hairpin turns down, turn,
back up, go ahead, turn, back up, down, turn, back up, go
ahead, down

The valley is clean-cut through rocky walls, and down
on the floor is the tiny stream rich with the foliage of date
palms, flowers, and ferns. But in the dusk we saw little of
this; we could only guess at it.

We were late because we had dallied along the way to
photograph flowers. We had surmounted the cliffs of Con-
cepci6n, we had wallowed through the salt of its lagoons,
we had wound through a forest of giant cacti, and we had
cleared a path for our wheels by rolling boulders aside in
a stony arroyo. At last we had reached an Elysian plateau
among the peaks of the Sierra de la Giganta, and life now
seemed sweet. The naturalists wanted a record of the desert
blossoms in color, and they deserved some reward for their
labor.

We did not know that the lava beds were still ahead.
We were in a dreamland of red blossoms entwined around
cactus and tree. These fields were the first of these flowers,
which we were to see later, much later, in greater quantities
in the semitropical region of the Cape. But of this we were
ignorant. We supposed this was our only chance at the
gorgeous vines. The two naturalists quite rightly went
camera-crazy. And I, having no color camera, could only

IO8 THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL

watch and secretly look for lions.

I wanted very much to see one of them. It was In this
same country, amid the Sierra de la Giganta, where strong-
man Ugarte made a great name for himself. The area was
infested with mountain lions, and the Indians would not
kill them. They were afraid to try. And they were ashamed
to admit they were afraid, and so they covered their fear
with a superstition that anybody who killed a lion would
in turn die before nightfall. This saved face for everybody.
As a result the lions became downright nasty in arrogance.
They would stand aside for no one.

One day Father Ugarte, riding along on a mule, saw a
lion on the trail ahead. Obviously the lion didn't mean to
give way. Father Ugarte was not superstitious, but his mule
was. The frightened mule would not advance. The Padre
dismounted and tied the animal to a tree. Then Father
Ugarte, who never carried arms, picked up a stone and
walked toward the lion. He clumped the lion on the head
with the stone. The lion dropped, knocked out. Ugarte
finished the job there on the ground.

The Padre needed the dead lion as evidence for the In-
dians of the Mission, six miles away. He tried hoisting the
huge beast onto the back of the mule. But the frightened
mule circled and reared out of reach. So Father Ugarte
changed his tactics. He hoisted the lion onto a tree-branch
overhanging the trail. He mounted, and with his spurs
forced the mule under the branch. It took a long time. But
the panicky mule finally lunged under the branch. As he
did so Father Ugarte caught the lion and threw it crosswise
in front of him. The mule didn't stop galloping until the
Mission was reached.

THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL 1OQ

The blood of the lion was still warm when Father Ugarte
tossed the carcass upon the Mission grounds. This warmth
was sufficient evidence to the Indians that Father Ugarte
had killed the beast. They gathered around the body of the
lion, and waited all day for Father Ugarte to die.

This story, incidentally, was repeated so often among the
Indians that even the Seri had heard of the strong man's
deed, when he later visited them on Tiburon. And it had
much to do with his exceptional welcome there.

Another digression, and I am not yet settled for the night
in Comondu. It is the fault of the country a great land
of digressions.

To enter a strange Mexican village at night, and to be-
come adjusted there in the darkness, is a trick all its own
and one which I have yet to master. There is a deeper secret
to it, apparently, than just trying again. For I have worked
at the problem both on Mexico's mainland and on the
peninsula. And a strange Mexican village at night leaves
me as bewildered as ever. I lack, I suppose, what the real
masters of the art would call intuition. Either you have it
or you haven't.

In our own country, on entering a town after dark, we
are accustomed to seeing street-lights and bright advertise-
ments in front of the town's lunch-counter and garage.
These lights give us our orientation, regardless of the size
of the town. But when night falls upon a Mexican village,
the village itself falls with it, seemingly, and becomes as
black as the earth. The darkness takes all.

A few Mexican windows may show the faint gleam of
flickering lamps or candles; but there is nothing to designate
the village store from the village jail, or a village home

1IO THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL

from the jail or the store. Even in daytime it is hard enough,
at times, to distinguish between home and store, since a
home may also be the store.

Not knowing a thing about the dark town, I first of all
looked for the village policeman. He was easy to find be-
cause of his white uniform. He was seated in the plaza talk-
ing with two other Mexicans. Though he could not help
but have been aware that a strange truck had arrived from
the north, he had not rushed up demanding who we were
or what we were doing. He had waited for us to make the
first gesture, a trait which later was to prove characteristic
of all of Comondu. Always it is up to the stranger to make
the first move. If he turns out to be acceptable to the people
of the little town, then they gather around him to satisfy
their curiosity.

When I asked the policeman where we might pitch our
camp for the night, he sent a boy to summon the sub-dela-
gado, who corresponds to a mayor. This, I presume, was
to show us we were to have important consideration. For
the policeman himself knew very well where we would
camp, since there was only one suitable spot in the narrow
village, under the date palms of the community orchard.

The sub-delagado arrived out of the darkness and in-
troduced himself. He was Ramon E. Marquez. Neither he
nor the policeman spoke English. The Spanish word for
beer is cerueza, and one has only to pronounce it with a
question-mark. The rest is understood. With the sub-
delagado guiding the way, we trooped into a tiny dwelling
for beer. The building was both a store and a home.

You can usually buy beer of some sort in the larger
villages of the peninsula. Most likely it won't be cold, for

THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL 111

Ice Is a rarity. But the beer will be genuine. Villages such
as Comondu do not allow stronger stuff to be sold.

In this regard the two naturalists were lucky in a way.
They neither drink nor smoke. How they could do it, I
don't know. One would take beer on rare occasions. The
other touched nothing. This always left It squarely up to
me to perform the International amenities whenever favors
were wanted of the natives. I had no feeling of martyrdom
about this. At the end of a hard day there was nothing quite
so satisfying as tipping one of my stored bourbon bottles
with a stranger, just to watch him thaw and become friends
and promise all sorts of things that he might not be in a
position to perform. He would mean well.

Here in Comondu we drank rounds of the village beer
by candlelight. There were quite a few of us In the adobe
building, the sub-delagado, the policeman, some villagers,
and a stranger who just came along In the excitement. None
of us seemed to know who he was. Peace and good will were
among us.

Later we made a triumphal march to the camping
grounds, the sub-delagado leading, and considerable of the
town following.

I am purposely going into detail about all this because
the procedure is illustrative of what I consider the etiquette
of entering a remote Mexican village at night. It is best
to have some little ceremony of courtesy on each side, much
the same as when entering a Mexican's home, no matter
how humble. A village, after all, is his home.

In villages that are more accustomed to travelers, the
routine is less elaborate and personal. But Comondu is of
the untouched old school. When the villagers led us to the

112 THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL

site for our camp, they made no effort to impress us by
praising it. They were merely presenting us in their politest
manner the best tlfey had to offer. It was up to us to say
how satisfactory it was.

The tall date palms formed our canopy. We struck open
our folding cots and our sleeping bags, a performance which
fascinated the circle of spectators. They really wanted to
examine the complicated workmanship of the cots. But
none of them was bold enough to ask to be shown how the
involved joints worked. The smaller boys gasped with
amazement (they may even have giggled slightly) when
the naturalist with the air-mattress knelt to the ground,
put his mouth to the valve, and blew the mattress into shape.
It was a big night.

Our camp-lantern threw strange shadows upon the curi-
ous faces around us, and our insect-collecting naturalist,
continuing his work, as usual, of snatching at things which
flew. We steeped tea and boiled coffee for any of our guests
who wanted it. Each cupful was received with a bow and
a gracias. They wanted very much to watch us go to bed too.
But the sub-delagado finally motioned everyone home. The
circle obediently melted away. Just like that.

The birds that had been frightened from the trees at our
arrival now returned to perch above us for the night. We
heard the rustling among the high branches of the palms.
Now and then a date or a seed or a twig would fall, jarred
off by the birds. But there were no other sounds. In all of
Comondu there was silence. The village was as quiet and
as totally dark as the peaks of the Sierra around it.

I felt I could sleep a long time in Comondu.

Besides, tomorrow would be Sunday.

CHAPTER is

IF PEACE on Earth ever comes around again, allowing our
universities to return to normal, I suggest that a fellowship
be endowed for the study and preparation of a treatise on
Mexican Family Pictures and How They Are Hung. My
own notes on the subject, though not exactly superficial, are
but a shadowy outline of what might be done if one had
the time and money to be scientifically complete.

The walls of a Mexican home do not seem to be there
so much for the purpose of keeping out the wind as for
holding the stern photographs of uncles, grandfathers,
mothers, cousin, aunts; and the photographs of their graves.

A Mexican house is not home unless it contains on one
wall a gilded frame so heavy with curlycues that the whole
side of the house appears to be groaning under the weight.

The picture within the massive frame is judged superior,
not so much by the quality of its photography as by the
extent of the tinting on cheekbone, eye, and lip. This tint-
ing can be performed at home and renewed annually, when
the eldest school-daughter returns home with a box of bor-
rowed school paint. Sometimes crayons have been found
suitable, so long as they are red. Any tone will do, be it
a muddy maroon or a virulent vermilion; the only essential
is that there be plenty of it.

One would think that a people so passionate about dis-
playing family photographs in the front room would be
fond of having their photographs taken. I can't say that

114 THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL

they dislike it, but I can say that they make a most torturous
ordeal of posing.

In the name of art it never pays to ask a Mexican if he
will permit his picture to be taken. The moment he con-
sents, all naturalness leaves his body. He snaps rigidly to
attention, eyes dead ahead, arms to sides and if there were
a coffin in the background you'd be witnessing his in-
terpretation of the Last Minute of Maximilian.

But, for art's sake, there's another catch too, all of which
leads to an impasse. Any Mexican, of high or low degree,
feels a blood-curdling anger at having his picture snapped
without his consent. Quite naturally. Most of us felt the
same during the heyday of candid-cameras. But a Mexican,
be he riding a burro or driving a picturesque cart, does
more than just get mad about it. When he sees the un-
invited camera aimed his way, he usually retaliates with
an upraised thumb. This gesture, in the Mexican language
of gestures, is unspeakably obscene, and with it he is ex-
pressing his opinion of the cameraman.

Again for the sake of his art, a conscientious cameraman,
I presume, doesn't mind the insult provided he gets a satis-
factory exposure. But this is what I mean by an impasse.
The Mexican's gesture and the snapping of the shutter
usually coincide.

The problem now involves the question whether it's
best to ask permission first and receive a wooden subject,
or not to ask permission and leave yourself open to obscene
libel. Long ago, though, I made my own choice. To hell
with art. I prefer asking.

And in Comondu, a photographer's paradise, I stuck to
the vow.

THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL 115

The next morning It was Sunday I visited the home
of a Mexican family whose eldest daughter had once lived
In the United States, The sub-delagado ? speaking no Eng-
lish, guided me to the home in hope that the daughter
would help in explaining the more intricate antiquities
of the village, the old Mission and such. I had been getting
along fairly well, though, the way It was. The delagado
thought I might like the family, anyhow. I did. I liked
them all, at once.

The yard was typically Mexican, with all of the family
animals running around everywhere. There were the dogs,
the cats, the hens, one goat, and a grand old family cow.
Big trees hung over the yard and the outdoor kitchen, with
its table and its outdoor fire for cooking.

I wanted a picture of the home just as it was, the family
grouped around in relaxed contentment. For we were hav-
ing a good time, smoking and telling a lot of stories, and
even the animals seemed to be enjoying the Sunday morn-
ing. A Mexican yard or a Mexican home without its animals
is well, I don't know what it is, for there is no such thing.
Animals are more than a sign of prosperity. To a Mexican
they indicate a momentary lack of need. They are like
jewels.

This home, for instance, had two baby pigs. They as-
sumed the run of the house just as puppies might do. The
pigs chased each other from one room to the next, squealing
and sliding around corners on their tiny sharp hoofs. The
baby pigs seemed to understand they were on display before
visitors, and continued bounding around under our chairs
in the parlor while we talked. I liked it. It was all so matter-
of-fact. Animals indicate life, and Mexicans thrive on the

Il6 THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL

spectacle of life.

Then I made the mistake of asking the happy family if 1
might take a picture of all the members outside in the
yard, just as I had seen them first. A pallor came over them.
For a long time nobody spoke. The importance of the pic-
ture became heavier and heavier as they thought about it.

Yes, it would be a splendid thing to have a picture. Yes,
they would like a picture very much. But what would they
wear for the picture? They would have to be given time to
change their clothes. Could the eldest daughter have time
to put on her wedding dress? No, come to think of it, the
wedding dress had been loaned to a neighbor family across
the river for a funeral.

"Consuela" this was the smallest girl "Consuela, you
go over to the Pascals' and tell them we need the wedding
dress back. Tell them we're going to have a picture taken.
Go now. Run fast."

The cow, which most of all I wanted in the picture, was
led out of the yard beyond sight. When I protested, their
chorus reply was most reasonable: "A cow! You mean you'd
let a cow be in our picturel"

Next the boys began leading away the goat. I pleaded
that it at least be allowed to remain. But the response was
the same.

"A goat! You'd let a goat be in our picture? Oh, my no/'

The removal of animals continued throughout the yard,
much as if the family had been warned of a coming raid.
Frenzied commands were rattled off in swift Spanish, which
did not help me. The commands were obeyed before I had
time to comprehend their meaning or file another protest,
useless though it would be.

DRYING DATES AT COMONDU

THE NATURALISTS AT WORK WITH THEIR CLASSIFYING AND STUFFING

THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL I 1^

Grandma was off In another room somewhere with two
girls who helped her get into her best black. Two other
daughters were quarreling over who would get to wear the
blouse of blue sateen. One of the sons w r as accusing his
brother of taking the brown shoes. The mother was telling
me how bad it was that her hair looked the way it did; I
really should have seen it the day she was married.

I had another worry also, my camera. Of the film I had
no doubt. The film was all right. And I didn't fear the
possibility of a double-exposure. I had schooled myself
against that error. But my camera was a little thing which
I had bought on the eve of my departure from San Diego.
I'd had no chance to have films developed during the
journey. I was without proof that the little camera actually
took pictures. But the possibility of complete blanks had
never seemed serious, to the point of tragedy, until this
heavy hour of preparation.

In just another few minutes, sir, and everyone will be
ready In just another few minutes, sir. In just another
few minutes

If it seems odd that I had been unable to convince them
that a picture, after all, was just a picture, it may seem odder
still that I was the one who now had been completely won
over to the thunderous gravity of what I was about to do.
I found myself in a state of jitters fully as high as their own.
I had stage fright.

I could never serve on a firing-squad. I couldn't go
through with it. I know this now for sure. For my victims
would appear to me, exactly as this family appeared when
one by one the members gravely moved out of their home
to assume their respective attitudes of stone. The grand-

Il8 THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL

mother alone was brave. She merely quivered slightly.

When it was over and ended, the cow, the goat, the pigs,
the hens slowly trooped back into the yard again. But the
gay spirit of Sunday was no longer around. It had vanished
like death. Too much had happened for the day ever to
be the same again.

There was nothing left but to gather up my camera,
murmur a few good-bys, and walk away, a murderer bear-
ing his guilt.

I'd like to say that something stirring and important
happened to us in Comondu; but far from it. One has the
feeling there that nothing very exciting has occurred in a
hundred years or more. I think the most charming thing
about the place is that sense of dreamlike tranquillity reach-
ing far back into the past.

Later Sunday morning we watched a young man spin a
hair-rope in his backyard. I was glad of a chance to see this
done, for I'd been struck with the seeming complexity of
the finished product in the shops in Tijuana.

It is actually very simple. The young man sat shuffling
handfuls of hair together into a strand while a companion
walked backward with one end of the strand, spinning it
the while on a piece of whirling stick. That was all. And
when they finished one strand they immediately started in
on another, then another. One strand would be of black
hair, the next of dirty white. Then they deftly spun these
various strands into the completed rope. I was a little dis-
appointed that it wasn't more difficult.

In Comondu that morning the villagers turned out to
sprinkle down the dust of their short cobbled street and
sweep the stones with crude brooms. Everybody turned to,

THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL lig

the children, the women, even the village policeman in his
radiant white uniform and military cap. It was done with a
natural ease, as if it were the expected thing and no doubt
it was. And I thought how differently we'd have gone about
such a communal enterprise in an American town. I could
see committees being formed, newspaper pictures of the
mayor holding a broom, and rival factions fighting over
the honor of the chairmanship of Clean-Up Day. And of
course there would be the Clean-Up Day Queen with maids-
of-honor.

Ill always remember the group of men and boys sitting
next a wall in the shade of an acacia tree on the main village
street. There they sat the Sunday afternoon through, just
sitting and whittling and, I presume, talking. It was like
one of our own old-time village Sunday afternoons, far
removed from war and radio-worry. To this group Comondu
was the whole world; and each passer-by on the cobbled
street an event for consideration.

This group doubtless had its opinion of me, for I was
doing far too much hurrying around. And, as usual, I was
hatless, an oddity in itself under that Mexican sun. But
there was much in Comondu that I wanted to see and
record with my little camera, while the noon light was just
right. But this silent jury, sitting there beneath the acacia
tree, was gradually getting me down. It finally won. I gave
up. I stuffed my uncertain camera back into the truck, then
walked over to the group in unconditional surrender.
There's no use fighting a losing cause. If only it would
take me in, the group could name its own terms.

By now our truck had inched its way some three-fourths
of the length of the peninsula. On leaving Comondu we

ISO THE LAN'D WHERE TIME STANDS STILL

would be into homestretch for La Paz. We were beginning
to be pretty confident about reaching the Tip. But we
were yet to go through the dustiest region I have ever seen
anywhere. An ocean of dust, It turned out to be. And, as
usual, It was to come by surprise. By now I had grown a
bit cocky In the belief that no future dust could be worse
than the dust we had already wallowed through. But we
were to learn about the dust of San Domingo, on the north-
ern edge of the Magdalena Plain.

I recall, now, how one of the older men In that little
group one who had made the journey from Comondu
to La Paz tried to tip me off about this dust. And I had
not listened as well as I should have. I was too occupied,
it seerns, trying to shift my status from the one being judged
to a place on the supreme bench. I was determined to be
received by my peers beneath the acacia tree.

There was a challenge in their failure to ask questions
about me or my business. If I wished to volunteer the In-
formation I could do so, and they would weigh the evidence
In silence. This was understood. It was up to me. My whole
morning's activity, anyhow, had been as plain as a sign-
board. They had seen me trying my best to become absorbed
In the ancient Mission of San Jose Comondu (1708) and, as
usual, rather failing to do so. Oh, I obediently took down
the dates and the founder's name, Father Julian de Mayorga,
a Jesuit. And had dutifully gone Inside and roamed around,
and noted by the flowers and candles that the Mission was
still in use. There were ancient pictures on the walls, mostly
of saints holding babies. In one room rows of child-sized
chairs told me that the Mission was also used as a school.

The Mission bell, bearing the date 1708, hung outside

THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL 121

on a scaffold In the yard. This practice, of hanging bells out-
side on a low scaffold, is common in Lower California.
Sometimes there will be three or four of them hanging to-
gether. It's always comforting to see these bells, since it's a
sign that the thieves have not gotten to them. For bell-steal-
ing was at one time a favorite sport of vandals in Low y er
California, a senseless j apery because most of the bells were
deliberately thrown away or tossed into the sea.

A coop of squawking chickens was in the Mission yard
too; a permanent coop, a regular chicken-house. And a
giant tree threw a shadow over all the time-trodden com-
pound. It was all very picturesque, but my interest was not
so much in Comondu's ancient Mission as in its present
inhabitants.

But my jury of peers, even after I had joined the group
beneath the acacia, remained silent. I couldn't help won-
dering what they thought of me. Was I a gringo who all
morning had considered myself of too much importance to
sit and rest awhile? If so, now they would punish me by
showing indifference. Was I dying for an opportunity to
speak of myself? Of all the places I had been? Of the price I
must have paid for my camera? Of all the itemized belong-
ings within such a magnificent truck? Was I dying to tell
about it all?

The silent game between us was neither pleasant nor
unpleasant. It was simply a lapse of time. Perhaps there
would be talk, but I would have to start it. All of us were
smoking the American cigarettes I had handed round; the
air beneath the acacia was cool and clean. A train of burros,
heavily laden as usual, clattered over the cobbles and soon
vanished toward the peaks of the Sierra de la Giganta. A

122 THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL

family across the road was out in its yard assorting dates on
the drying mats. (Dates had to be worked by schedule, be it
Sunday or any other day.) A small girl with an oil-can was
drawing water from the village's community spigot next
the plaza with its tiny bandstand. An old woman under a
black shawl walked by us on the cobbles and nodded in
Spanish: "Good afternoon."

I was the first to respond too much the first maybe but
it was my chance. "Good afternoon, mother." I said it in
Spanish softly, just as I should. But at least I had spoken.
I had broken the game, I had spoken first, so now all of us
could talk. It was all right now for all of us to talk. Neither
side had lost face.

"Do you like it here, sir?"

"I like it here very much," I answered sincerely. "I like
it here better than any place I've been."

"We watched you make carnp last night. How did you
sleep, sir?"

"Never have I slept better, sir. No noise. No mosquitoes.
Comondu is most fortunate not to have mosquitoes when
it has so much water."

We were deliberately keeping our Spanish formal and, as
a result, stilted.

"You seemed to be very busy with your camera. We eh
we didn't want to interrupt you. Did it cost much?"

"My camera it is a very bad one, I'm afraid. I got it
cheap, second-hand. But I do not deserve a better camera,
even if I had been able to get one, for I am a very bad pho-
tographer. I hope I did not look too silly running around
taking pictures. Gringos can look awful silly running
around taking pictures."

THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL

There's a trick I had learned about the use of this word
"gringo" when among Mexicans. Though the word Is sup-
posed to be derogatory, an American, by using the word
first on himself, can take the sting out of it. In other words,
he can beat the Mexicans to their own tag-line. By saying it
with a grin he can engagingly admit: "Yes, alas, I'm a gringo.
But there's nothing to be done about it. I can't help it, and
isn't it too bad."

The Mexicans are then most likely to consider this mis-
fortune a great joke. And they aren't so likely afterward to
use the word, at least in a derogatory sense, toward some-
one who has been so frank about his birth-mistake.

"We think you would find great hunting in these hills if
you would stay around here longer. There are lots of lions
too, but lions are not good to eat."

"So I understand" still keeping my Spanish as formal
as my limited knowledge would allow "but just the same
I really would like to stay here a long time. Would you guide
me around the hills?"

"Certainly, sir. Any of us could find you a lion. But your
companions? What do they hunt?"

"They're naturalists," I explained. "They hunt speci-
mens. They hunt " Well, I might as well come right out
with it. "They hunt mice and rats."

"So we heard. And that is what we wanted to know. Do
they sell them?"

"Oh, my no. They put them in a museum for people to
see."

"Like a circus?"

"No " Just how could I explain? "It's not like a circus.
It's more like a school. It's free for people to see."

124 THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL

"Oh. You mean a school of mice and rats?"

With that the jury gave It up. So did I.

"From here we go to La Paz," I said quickly. "And then
we go to the Tip. We go to Cape San Lucas. How is the road
between here and La Paz?"

This is when the oldest man answered the answer I later
was to recall so well: "Fair, fair, sir. Very fair except for
some dust.**

* "Well, we've seen considerable dust already." I think I
smiled when I said it, which makes my smugness all the
more painful to remember. "Yes, we've seen all kinds of
dust."

"I imagine so/' the old man answered. "This dust we're
speaking of will be at San Domingo."

CHAPTER 13

BURY ME not on the Magdalena Plain. But a lot of people
have been buried there through the centuries. And there
are others who should have been buried but were not.
Coyotes long ago have finished the bones, and a new scrub
cactus marks the spot.

The whole trouble with the Magdalena Plain, other than
its utter dearth of drinkable water, is its utter dearth of
landmarks. The plain simply goes on and on, one square
mile the same as the next. Even the spectacle of a knoll
would be a novelty. We were something like two days cross-
ing it, which may give some idea of the size of it. If we were
two days by truck, one can only imagine what it must have
been in the old days, on burro or afoot. Yes, people have
tried to cross it afoot. Even parties of Forty-Niners tried to
cross it. Some succeeded. Some didn't.

A gray monotony hangs over the whole land. Even the
cactus is grayer than in most places. Even the coyotes seem
grayer and hungrier. The coyotes of the Magdalena Plain
will eat anything. They haunt the beaches. They literally
will eat the sail off a beached boat. They will chew up the
painter-lines, too, setting small boats adrift. I know of
friends who, while sleeping ashore on the sands of Magda-
lena Bay, have had their shoes eaten by coyotes at night.
Everything that lives on the Magdalena Plain is perpetu-
ally hungry and thirsty.

There is no range of mountains within sight to break

125

126 THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL

the horizon. There Is nothing. There is only the flatness of
the Magdalena Plain reaching on and on into infinity, into
the end of the earth. All you have to do to become lost is
to wander some distance away from the road, and then try
to find your way back again. Every bush looks the same.
Nor would a lost man, by wandering westward towards the
sea, find much of anything either. He might find the desert
shores of Magdalena Bay, no doubt, but he would have a
hard time finding drinking water.

Yet Magdalena Bay, despite its unearthly surroundings,
has been tops in its time for stories and history. Some of
the earlier stories have to do with pirates, later with whal-
ers, then still later with the one big attempt to colonize the
area. The effort, starting in 1870, went flat on its ear within
a year. The outfit, known as the Chartered Company of
Lower California, landed approximately five hundred
would-be American colonists upon the shore of this desert.
That was the end of that. No water. No anything. Lots of
space.

The Mexican Government for a reason has been lib-
eral with its former land grants in this region. There was,
for instance, the record-breaking land grant of twelve mil-
lion acres to the Magdalena Bay Company. But its final
score was zero also.

Outside of the early whalers, who really did make as-
tonishing hauls inside Magdalena Bay, the nearest the re-
gion ever came to big-time enterprise was an experiment
with orchilla-gathering for dyes. What is more, the experi-
ment actually worked for a time. It actually resulted in
the Chartered Company making some money out of it. For
orchilla, a lichen resembling Spanish moss, still grows on

THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL 127

almost every bush around here. What killed the enterprise
was the invention of chemically produced dyes.

Magdalena Plain remains the hard-luck desert of the
peninsula.

But the vast bay Is something else again, very much some-
thing else again, especially with times being what they are
on the Pacific. So vast is the bay that at one time it served as
the target grounds for the whole of the United States fleet.
So vast does the bay remain, and so many hidden inlets does
It contain, that Magdalena is something very much under
watch right now by both Mexico and the United States.
But my own war-report about Magdalena Bay will come
later.

At the moment our truck is still on Magdalena Plain, and
the bay Itself is far off to the southwest somewhere out of
sight, the whole great twisting length of it. And we in turn
are still enmeshed in that mysterious flatness which, when
seen from an anchored vessel (as Magdalena Plain usually is
seen), is still flat.

Nor is there anything to be done about it except to keep
going on and on in hope there will be a break to the deso-
late flatness somewhere, someday.

I should even like to encounter some meandering
stranger desperately in need of water. But we meet nobody
who is dying from thirst or otherwise. We meet nothing at
all. Yet, for the sake of a story, I have it all planned what I
should like to do, if only we could meet up with a victim
to oblige me. I would drop to my knees to bathe his parched
lips, next I would apply the water slowly drop by drop so
that he would not bloat or blow up. . . .

But indeed, throughout the whole of the peninsula, the

128 THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL

nearest I came to such a happy encounter had been far back,
a week or so previously, on a road leading to Punta Prieta.
There a cowboy had halted his mule far ahead of us on
the trail. As we approached him he had raised one hand to
halt us. We halted.

"Agua" he said.

He did not say the word loudly, he merely murmured it.
This made the case all the more promising. I must have
responded, I think, with all the glee of a newly uniformed
women's auxiliary with its first prospect. I was out of the
truck in no time and by the cowboy's side. In one hand
drooped his empty water-bottle, and he listlessly showed
it to me the mute emptiness. But other than that he did
not play fair. He did not swoon off his mule. He continued
sitting right up there.

Nor when I handed him the water did he take it drop
by drop. He gulped it all down, at least a quart of it, with-
out stopping to breathe. Nor did I feel I was in any sort of
an authoritative position to tell him this was not the way
to do it. The cowboy knew more about water than I did,
and no doubt he knew more about thirst as well. Nor, un-
like the stories, did he give me in gratitude the secret
code to the whereabouts of a lost gold mine guarded by
hostile Indians. All he did, in fact, after I had filled his
bottle after filling him, was to thank me most formally.
Then he turned his mule around and rode on and out
of my life forever.

Yet my mind will always retain the symbolism of his
gesture, his one hand held up, and his single word, "Agua"
The whole thing would do as the statue-symbol for all of
Lower California. Agua with it the country could be

THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL 12Q

everything. Even with two or three dams to hold the sea-
sonal rains, the country could be everything. Or at least a
lot of It could be everything. "Just give me agua" as the
cowboy indicated, the spokesman for all his people.

But it's their own fault, of course. It's not Nature's. It's
their own fault for not being able to get together and build
the dams.

With Magdalena Plain, though, I doubt if even a dam
would help. I am no engineer, but I saw no possible water-
sheds within any reasonable distance. That is, unless a hun-
dred miles Is a reasonable distance. The entire plain is rich
enough to grow shrubs. The soil is rich enough to grow nat-
ural foliage. But without controlled water, or the hope of
controlled water, Magdalena Plain will remain forever and
forever, I presume, exactly what it always has been a small
continent of flat land left over.

My introduction to the worst of the Magdalena Plain
may have prejudiced me. After leaving the sweet valley of
Comondu, we had been driving along as nicely as could be,
minding our own business, and actually running up mileage
on the speedometer. This should have been warning
enough. For wherever there is a straightaway in Lower Cal-
ifornia, and whenever the going starts to seem merry and
gay, the time has arrived to watch out.

We didn't watch out. So drunk were we with revived ex-
pectations of finally reaching La Paz within our own life-
time, that we speeded things up a bit. The first of the Mag-
dalena Plain, though bumpy, was not too bumpy. We
whirled by a few abandoned adobe huts without bothering
to investigate whether they really were abandoned. We
sailed on, the speedometer for the first time on the journey

THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL

clicking off twenty miles an hour. During one rare moment,
twenty-four! We sailed through the tiny settlement of San
Domingo. The natives rushed to their doorways to see us
go by. We waved benevolently at them, but did not stop
to talk. We could not be bothered. Our speed of twenty
miles had gone to our heads. We were speed demons*

We sailed through San Domingo, and just barely out of
It, when it happened. The world exploded as If hit by a
comet, and now the smoke of the particles remained. They
engulfed what had been the earth's atmosphere, and we
were riding through them. The dust, which is a polite word
for It, occupied all of space. There was no sun. And at night
there would be no moon. Dust Is all there would be ever
again.

Our own wheels were responsible, but we did not know.
Our wheels were grinding the dust cloud aloft, and the
breeze was carrying it along with us, and also far on ahead of
us, and also far out on all sides of us. We were blind and
smothered within a world of our own making.

The blizzard, on beating against the windshield, accumu-
lated into layers an inch thick, then rolled off periodically
under its own weight. It would strike, accumulate, then
roll off again, much as snow does. We had no alternative but
to try to keep moving ahead. If we stopped we would stick.
We were not driving through sand. The sensation was more
as if we were driving through the storage-vats of some queer
flour mill. Yet there must be an end to it somewhere. There
wasn't.

If the breeze had been head-on, we might occasionally
have had hopes of seeing where we were going. We were
without air to breathe. But even if there had been air, I

THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL 13 1

doubt If we could have Inhaled it; our nostrils, our mouths,
were stuffed full of dust. We could not talk. We could not
give advice one to the other, or to the one at the wheel. He
had the worst of it, and all we could hope was that the
wheels might continue turning, that we might keep mov-
ing. Yet each whirl of the wheels merely enlarged our own
prison. We were beating our own game. The sea of powder
had us.

Daylight was what we wanted, the sight of daylight and
the feel of air again, and we hoped for it over a distance
of w r hat must have been two miles or three, or possibly a
thousand. Then we did stop. We had to. Our truck
made the decision by stopping of its own accord. We were
stuck.

The breeze carried some of the dust away from us. For
the first time we were able to see slightly where we were--
or weren't. We were, it seems, stalled directly in front of a
hut. An old Mexican came out of the doorway to look at us.
My first vision was of him standing there, gradually assum-
ing mortal shape through a gray cloud. The transfigured
vision of him and his shadowy hut will always return to me,
I am afraid, should I ever again hear anybody recite the
tranquillities of wanting to Live in a House by the Side of
the Road, Where . . .

But the old man seemed tranquil enough. After he had
stood there awhile, coughing to clear his throat of dust, he
merely asked us in Spanish: "What could be the trouble,
sir?"

We did not tell him. Here was one case, I thought, where
we might as well keep him in suspense him and his whole
Magdalena Plain.

igg THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL

A little haphazard side road goes to Magdalena Bay, and
that is all, although Magdalena Bay is the greatest natural
bay on the west coast of the North American Continent.

Magdalena Bay is larger and deeper by far than the Har-
bor of San Francisco, and, if anything, corresponds more
to the entirety of Puget Sound. But as for comparing with
the perfectly landlocked harbor of San Diego, Magdalena
Bay could swallow all of San Diego's harbor within one of
the comparative tiny lagoons.

Magdalena Bay is a freak, albeit a possibly important one.

But even as I write, changes are taking place down there,
and have been taking place down there since the Black Sun-
day of December 7.

Despite its overpowering surroundings of sand-dunes,
Magdalena Bay no longer is as wide-open for secret hide-
aways as it was when (I was to learn about it definitely in
La Paz) Japanese submarines hid there for a short time
prior to the surprise blow-off, and prior to their surprise
raid on Upper California shipping. It all happened at about
the same time, remember? Pearl Harbor and these raids.

Magdalena Bay was, as usual, neglected. This has been its
natural state, anyhow, century after century. Nor is any-
body precisely to blame. It's the surroundings. The Mexi-
can Government has maintained in recent years a bleak
little naval garrison there on one of the islands, Santa Mar-
garita. The haphazard road dwindles out to the edge of the
bay, and from there one goes by open boat out to what is
called the Naval Station.

The little Naval Station was supposed to serve not for
guard duty so much as for custom duty for whatever foreign
craft, especially fishing boats or pleasure boats, might de-

THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL 133

clare their presence Inside the vast harbor. The procedure
through the years has varied between being astonishingly
simple and astonishingly baffling but always thoroughly
Mexican. As an example, and not long before Pearl Harbor,
the little thirty-foot cabin cruiser Viking Maiden put into
Magdalena Bay from Southern California while en route to
La Paz and the Gulf. The Viking Maiden was on a pleasure-
fishing cruise which, incidentally, is quite a trip for a thirty-
foot cabin-cruiser to make with only tw T o persons aboard to
man her. They were the owners, Mr. and Mrs. Wade Olsen,
of Los Angeles. (I was to have dinner aboard their tiny ves-
sel later in La Paz, the only American flag to enter La Paz
during my weeks there.)

The few Mexican naval officers assumed technical cus-
tody of the little cabin cruiser, of course, and did it by
coming out in what corresponded to a rowboat. The offi-
cers, though wearing uniforms, were barefoot. They made
their boat fast to the Viking Maiden,, then asked if they
might be towed back to the station.

Certainly they might. And it all worked out splendidly,
the barefooted officers throwing out their fishlines and
trawling the while. It was a nice ride.

But the point is that now, with war on with Japan (war
with Germany wouldn't have counted so much in Lower
California), most of this indifference has changed in Magda-
lena Bay, as elsewhere along the other harbors of the coast.
Magdalena Bay is being watched today, not only by Mexi-
can sailors and soldiers, but also by military representatives
of the United States.

I'll not say exactly how many soldiers or sailors there are
around Magdalena Bay, or exactly where they are distrib-

134 E LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL

uted, or how they are attempting to maintain their guard.
Besides, the methods are being shuffled around day by day.
But we have heard it said, and we have heard it said plenty,
that something should be done about watching Magda-
lena Bay and the whole of the Lower California coastline,
including Vizcaino Bay, San Ignacio Lagoon, Scammon's
Lagoon, and the rest of them.

We must admit there is plenty of Lower California coast-
line to be watched. But we must admit, also, that there is
plenty of Upper California coastline to be watched. And a
lot of Alaska, and a lot of Oregon, and a lot of Washington,
and a lot of British Columbia. And a lot of everywhere.
Lower California is no exception.

Would, of course, that we had more facilities with which
to do the watching, both for patrolling Lower California
as well as the other places the world over, as well as our
own Upper California. But we haven't. At least not yet.
And that seems to be that.

But as for Lower California (which is the primary con-
cern of this report), the best which can be done with the
limited facilities of both Mexico and the United States is
being done. Also, the psychology of Mexicans is such, nat-
urally, that matters at this devastating era on earth are not
helped much when loud-mouthed Americans declare in
public: "Aw, what we oughta do is take over all of Lower
California."

Then they point to Magdalena Bay as an example. And
of the time immediately prior to Pearl Harbor when Jap-
anese submarines did lie in wait there (submerged by day),
awaiting the all-out signal. They had not been there long
apparently, but they were there in hiding undetected un-

THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL 135

til spotted one night by some stray Mexicans on that bleak
coast. And the Mexicans told us In La Paz, and two other
La Paz Americans and myself Immediately Informed the
Navy as best we could. Nor did the Navy ignore the report.
Not by any means. But by this time the subs already were off
our own coast with the dawn of Pearl Harbor. Things
worked fast.

But, I must add, the few stray Mexicans around Magda-
lena Bay had been caught no more by surprise than the
thousands of Americans In Honolulu itself who, sup-
posedly, were up on such things. And Magdalena Bay
wasn't. In all of its centuries of desolation Magdalena Bay
has never been expected to be in the know.

What had surprised me, as we drove along, was the dearth
of side roads connecting the Camino Real with these more
familiar harbors on the west coast. It was almost as If the
shore world were one thing, the interior another, and rarely
the twain should meet unless with tortuous difficulty.

The Mexicans as a rule are not a seafaring people. They
are not good commercial fishermen. Nor are they especially
excited about utilizing the seas which* 1 surround them. The
Japanese, when working the same waters, have been much
better at It.

All of which, of course, added to today's problem.

CHAPTER 14

ANXIOUS as I am to be getting on to La Paz that I may write
of people again, still it would not be fair to dismiss the west
coast with a shrug and let it go at that. Even though one
cannot see much of the coast from the Camino Real, only
portions of it here and there nevertheless the Pacific wa-
ters remain the main means of communication between the
two Californias, Upper and Lower.

It is a good deal like our own old days when water travel
was the easiest method of communicating between Seattle,
for instance, and San Francisco. Or between San Francisco
and San Diego. Overland travel through forest trails, moun-
tain trails, desert trails, took too long and was too uncertain.
And the Gamino Real of Lower California, as I have said
again and again, is still like that.

Boats still provide the best means of seeing the west coast
of Lower California from Ensenada southward. There are,
though, no regular passenger vessels. One either goes with
some fisherman friend on a fishing boat or on some private
pleasure boat. This has generally been the way of it as
long as I can remember in San Diego.

There have been from time to time in the past a few little
commercial vessels, other than fishing boats, which used to
make semi-regular runs with cargoes up from the Cape Re-
gion. The hardworking little motorship Jeannette R was
one of these. She used to carry tomatoes to San Diego and
San Pedro from San Jos del Cabo and from Todos Santos.

136

THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL I 7

But those days have been gone for some years, too, just as the
turtle-boats bringing sea-turtles up from Turtle Bay to San
Diego have long been given up. The onyx boat continued
(up to the time of this writing, at least) to bring onyx up
from the surf-landing beach of Santa Catarina, but this
beach, comparatively speaking, is not far south. It is actually
less than a fourth of the way.

What may baffle us, then, is why more commerce does not
move back and forth between the two Californias, especially
with so many natural harbors waiting on the peninsula un-
used. The answer to that one will also explain why the
peninsula itself remains such an unused and undeveloped
land. There is little In Lower California which Upper Cali-
fornia desperately needs, or cannot grow herself.

True, the Cape Region, with its seasons reversed as to
rain, is a natural for early tomatoes and sugarcane, and could
be a natural for coconuts if only the natives would bother
to grow more of them. Yet the answer is the equivalent of
the old Mexican comment, ' 'what's the use?" Nor have I yet
been able to find a reply for that one, other than the handi-
cap of import and export fees. And, again, the handicap of
difficult transportation. No railroad. Few boats. Bad roads.
The vicious circle continues. But it cannot include a lack of
harbors among the excuses.

Practically nothing has been done about these harbors,
either. They remain much the same as when first discovered
centuries ago. A skipper on entering them must still do most
of his own sounding as he goes along. The old charts (there
are no new ones) cannot be trusted because of shifting sand-
bars. The charts are revived replicas of old ones made orig-
inally by Americans, including, for instance, a certain

138 THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL

American naval officer named George Dewey. His charts of
Lower California are the ones still being reprinted and re-
used. Nor was he yet an admiral when he helped make them.
The years were between 1873 and 1875. At that time he was
a commander, and in command of the U.S.S. Narragansett.
The accompanying vessel on the survey was the U.S.S.
Hassler.

Nor am I in a position to answer why Mexico has done so
little toward charting her own peninsular waters. My an-
swer would have to be that I don't know, although the whole
thing is mindful of the time I asked a Mexican sheep-raiser
how it happened he could talk such good English. He was
living far away from any English-speaking contacts, yet his
English was such that it surprised me.

"My sheep were all dying/' he answered.

"So that's why you had to learn English? I don't quite get
it."

The Mexican went on to explain that when his sheep
mysteriously began dying he wrote to Mexico City for ad-
vice on how to save them. He thought maybe they were
getting the wrong kind of food, or maybe they were the
wrong kind of sheep for his type of land.

"Yes," I asked, "and what did Mexico City answer?"

"It answered that it had no advice to offer on the subject,
but suggested I write to Washington, D.C. So I wrote. I
wrote right away. My sheep were all dying, so what elsr
could I do? I wrote right away."

"And that's how you came to learn English?"

"No, not exactly like that," he continued. "I wrote them
in Spanish. I described my sheep and my land in Spanish.
But the answers the answers, you see, all came back in

THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL 139

English. Isn't that too bad? So to save my sheep I had to
hurry and learn English/'

"Did the answers save your sheep?"

"Yes," he answered simply. "Yes, the answers saved my
sheep."

But the crews of the U.S.S. Narragansett and the U.S.S.
Hassler would have appreciated the story more than I did.
For, after all, I haven't been doing much to clarify the ques-
tion of the harbors.

Yet for all of its desolation today the long twisting coast
of Lower California presents a much older story than that
of the coastline of our own Upper California. But in the
telling of the story more than four centuries would be in-
volved. First of all came the earliest of the bold Spanish
navigators who, in tumbledown crafts, endeavored to feel
their way northward from Mexico's west coast, and always
against the prevailing northwest winds. These winds served
as the barrier against northward travel and discovery, allow-
ing only a few early men, such as Cabrillo (in 1542) and
Vizcaino (some sixty years later), to get through out of the
scores who tried it. And who perished either from shipwreck
or scurvy in so doing.

These clumsy, high-riding vessels, built mostly out of
driftwood and scraps and containing no iron, would leave
the Mexican beaches on which the vessels were built and
head northward. Having no keels worth mentioning, the
wind could do with the vessels just about whatever it pleased.
The vessels would be pushed sideways as well as forward,
much like a leaf in a storm, and few such vessels ever re-
turned.

We may consider Rodriguez Cabrillo, a Portuguese flying

140 THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL

the Spanish flag, lucky to have reached Upper California at
all, and to have discovered, among other harbors, today's
harbor of San Diego. But he was not so lucky. At least he
was not lucky personally. For he was not destined to get
back to Mexico (New Spain) alive either. During a surf-
landing he fell, breaking his arm close to the shoulder. The
complications killed him. Today his bones lie buried in an
unmarked grave somewhere on San Miguel Island, off Up-
per California.

Sebastian Vizcaino, trying the same discovery stunt more
than a half-century later, did better. But not much better.
He got back to Mexico from today's Upper California, but
three-fourths of his crew did not. They died during the
voyage. They died of scurvy, mostly, and of thirst.

Then the Spanish galleons from the Philippines entered
the picture. But the records show that the Spanish galleons
could cross the Pacific from Manila in less time than a vessel
could buck the prevailing headwinds north to Upper Cali-
fornia from Mexico's mainland. None of this, of course,
makes much sense to us today. It's all a blur.

It was a hell of a blur, in fact. For the Spaniards were still
convinced about finding that mythical short-cut passage,
the Strait of Anian. They also were convinced about some-
day finding in the northern Pacific somewhere the two im-
aginary islands of "Rico de Oro" and "Rico de Plata." If
found these islands of gold and silver would serve instead
of the Californias as a midway base for the Manila galleons
en route to Mexico.

Yet if the story of Lower California's coastline were to
be turned into a pageant, the stage directions now would
read: Enter THE PIRATES. (ENGLISH, FRENCH, DUTCH

THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL 141

but mostly English.) They came to lie In wait for the Manila
galleons.

It would be wrong, as regards Lower California, to head
the list with the Englishman who actually started It all going
in the Pacific, Sir Francis Drake. It w r ould be wrong because,
though he did lead the way into the Pacific against Spain,
there are no positive records to show he ever put Into Lower
California. He skirted the shore northward, and It Is not
know r n whether he put Into Lower California anywhere for
water or provisions.

There is no guesswork about Sir Thomas Cavendish,
though. He made his biggest haul right at Cape San Lucas
itself. The year was 1587. Here, with the aid of his two Eng-
lish vessels, the Desire and the Content, he fought and cap-
tured the beautiful Spanish galleon Santa Ana, arriving
from Manila. He not only captured her but he also burned
her, yet not until he first had looted her of her cargo, includ-
ing "122,000 pesos of gold" or what roughly has been esti-
mated in our money as three million dollars.

Here begins one of Lower California's first mysteries, the
possibility that there is lost treasure within one of the coves
or on one of the beaches. It isn't that Sir Thomas Cavendish
lost his own share of the riches. He didn't. The young man
(he was barely in his twenties at the time) succeeded In re-
turning to England with most of the haul, and became a
hero.

But what he did, immediately after the battle, was to put
ashore at Cape San Lucas all of the Spanish passengers, men
and women. They numbered approximately a hundred and
ninety. Then he burned their galleon and sailed away. As
soon as he was out of sight the Spaniards resurrected the

142 THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL

burned hulk of the Santa Ana, patched her tip with some
sea-gear, and made their way to Acapulco to give their un-
happy account of what had happened to them to the viceroy.

But meanwhile something happened to one of the vessels
of Sir Thomas Cavendish, too. He was aboard the Desire,
bearing most of the prize. But the Content also had some of
the loot, and she immediately disappeared from sight with
it. Though a seaworthy craft, she was never seen again after
the first nightfall. Nor was there a storm. The supposition is,
of course, that her crew or captain, or both, tried to out-
smart Cavendish; and that some near-by island down there
still holds the bones of the vessel. And also its share of the
loot.

Likewise, this theory was Cavendish's own theory when,
on returning to England in glory, he made his own report
the report which includes the famed passage:

I have navigated along the coasts of Chili, Peru, and Nova
Spagna, where I made great spoils; I burnt nineteen ships,
small and great, and all the villages and towns I landed at
I burnt and spoiled.

Cavendish may have been the first big-time buccaneer to
have worked the Spanish galleons skirting Lower California
en route to Mexico from Manila, but he was not the last one.
He merely started the ball rolling there in a game which
endured for more than a century between England and a
waning Spain. There were some other buccaneer face-cards,
too, such as Woodes Rogers, William Dampier, Stephen
Courtney, Alexander Selkirk (better known as Robinson
Crusoe), Thomas Dover, John Clipperton, or the blustery
George Shelvocke. The latter, though, didn't do so well

THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL 143

around Cape San Lucas because in the midst of a battle he
would get drunk, and then forget to make up his mind.

There were others, too. Lots of others, of various nation-
alities. But this is hardly the place to tell more about them.
I prefer merely to indicate the niche they filled in the early
story of Lower California's coast.

After them, in due course, came the succession of otter-
hunters and otter-poachers; the pearl-pirates; and finally
the first Yankees. They were the whalers from New England,
and the otter-poachers from New England. But, strange as
it may seem to us of today, these Yankee skippers became
familiar with the waters of Lower California far ahead of
the time the first Yankee vessel was ever to touch today's
Upper California. That is the way it was in those days. All
movement toward new fields except by the Russians
was from Low T er California northward.

The trick about whaling along this Lower California
coast was not to hunt the whales at sea, but to wait inside
one of the spacious harbors and let the whales come inside
to the whaler. This is the way Magdalena Bay was worked
in the old days, and also Scamrnon's Lagoon, and San Ig-
nacio Lagoon, and the Bay of Whales itself, which lies just
outside of San Ignacio Lagoon.

Even today the whales (though not in such quantities)
continue their hereditary custom of frequenting these bays
in season for breeding and bearing the young. When the
season ends, the whales depart, usually heading north.

It would be a mistake for me to attempt a record of the
disasters which have taken place along that poorly chartered
shore even those which have occurred during my own
years in San Diego, and which I in turn have covered after

144 THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL

the reports finally drifted back.

The use of radios on all of the tuna-clippers has elim-
inated much of the danger of becoming permanently
stranded down there, with nobody on the outside knowing
about it. Those days have ended, although not altogether
In the case of non-radio-equipped little boats.

But never again will there be a case like that of the big
British whaler Tower Castle. While bound from the Pacific
back to Europe she was wrecked in the mouth of Scam-
mon's Lagoon. The year was 1836, if the year makes any
difference. One century was much like another as far as any
advancement on the western coastline is concerned.

Scammon's Lagoon is on the edge of the Vizcaino Desert,
a sister desert to the Magdalena Plain, through which we
had been traveling. The two deserts, in fact, actually join
one another. The crew of the Tower Castle managed to get
ashore safely to a man. Provisions were unloaded from the
wrecked whaler. Also the sailors were in a semi-paradise of
wild fowl, turtles, fish, clams, oysters by which they could
add to these provisions. But the crew had neglected to re-
move enough drinking water from the wreck, and now it
was too late. The wreck was filled with the sea.

An officer with a few men departed in the vessel's one
small boat to seek help. While they were gone, the last of the
drinking water gave out, nor could more be found by dig-
ging. Scammon's lagoon, then as now, is surrounded by sand-
dunes, miles and miles of sand-dunes. The marooned whal-
ers tramped these dunes hunting for a spring, hunting for
anything at all which might contain moisture. They found
none.

When the officer returned in another vessel with help,

THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL 145

he was too late. He found that his marooned shipmates one
by one had died from thirst. The last person to make notes
in the diary, found on the shore there, had recorded: ". . .
it is but reasonable to expect that my time will come soon.* 1
Each bay, each inlet, and each island of that coast has its
tale, both ancient and modern. Some of the tales have hap-
pier endings than the one I happened to use at random, that
of the Tower Castle. But others have no recorded endings,
either bad or good. Even today as one goes along, a sand-
dune, after being shifted by the wind, may reveal some whit-
tled carvings upon a piece of driftwood. And near the drift-
wood will be the tell-tale tiny pile of stones. Usually,
though, the wind-driven sands through the years have ob-
literated the crude carvings to the extent that not much
sense can be made out of them except the bigger sense.

CHAPTER 15

WE FOUND the great La Paz cringing on her knees In self-
pity and mistrust. And in ill-health. Everything of late had
gone wrong with her. Now the one-time pearl capital of the
Americas was a crouching figure of sadness indeed. Nobody
seemed to care about La Paz any more now that she had
lost her pearls.

Nobody toasted her as in the old days. Nobody ever came
to see her any more. Nobody seemed to care whether she
lived or died. Poor La Paz.

Poor me, too. For a distance of something like eleven
hundred road miles of rocks and dust and sand and heat I
had been expecting something better a triumphant finale
in La Paz.

Having reached the famed town overland, the Timbuktu
of the journey, I felt I had reached my goal and would just
as soon celebrate. The distance is only the skip-and-a-jump
of a day from La Paz to the very tip itself, Cape San Lucas.
So the rest of it could be made any old time. There was no
hurry.

Our truck had acquired two broken springs on the Mag-
dalena Plain. Miraculously La Paz contained just the neces-
sary parts for repairing. The two naturalists, not much in-
terested in towns anyhow, were anxious to continue their
collecting, their trapping, their stuffing. They had new
grounds to work over now. They were excited about the
prospect. They continued on with the truck. I would over-

146

THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL 147

take them, or they would overtake me, somewhere, some-
how, later.

I stayed to weep with La Paz, and to find out her own
version of why the whole world should suddenly be treating
her so meanly.

From a distance, when first viewed from eighteen miles
away from the high mesa, La Paz truly had appeared as mag-
nificent as I had expected it to be. We had just finished
crossing two days of bleakness on the Magdalena Plain, then
had cut sharply east again from the Pacific to the Gulf. But
from the high plateau, which is the southern end of the
Sierra de la Giganta, we had been able to look down upon
the Town of Pearls. There she lay, snuggled upon an arm
of the Gulf, as much of a dream-town as I had imagined her
to be.

"Ah, there she is at last. And she's worth coming for."

I presume I must have thought something like that at the
time, although by now I'm not sure just what I thought. So
much since then was to happen (or not happen) in La Paz to
mingle personal indifference with personal prejudices. I
too, I am afraid, joined with the others in kicking the old
lady around, now that she was down and her pearls gone.

Nor could she be blamed for the loss of her famous pearls.
It was not her fault. She had not been careless. Yet the loss
was so recent, and so inexplicable, that no wonder she had
not recovered from the shock.

I walked in just at the wrong time, is all. I walked in
during the midst of a family scene.

A mysterious epidemic to the pearl-oyster beds is what
caused it. Everybody in La Paz will agree on that part of the
tragedy. The pearl-oysters suddenly all died within a single

148 THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL

season not very long before my arrival. The beds all died
at once, even those which were a hundred miles apart. Noth-
ing like it had ever happened before in the entire history of
La Paz pearling. And it's a long history. It goes back to the
days of Montezuma on the mainland, and before him. But
the pearls of his court were from "the isle of mystery" far
to the north. Cortez, who could be depended on to nose into
the source of everything, nosed his way into the source of
these pearls, too. He got all excited about them. And that is
the reason he sent out expeditions in search of "the isle of
mystery" far to the north. And that is the reason California
was discovered when it was.

Cortez himself didn't discover the Californias, as is some-
times said he did. A pilot named Fortun Ximenez did the
trick but not until after he had murdered his captain with
a knife.

Ximenez, not daring now to return to the home port to
face Cortez, kept right on going with the little vessel north-
by-west. He didn't much care where he went. He hit the
Cape Region of today's Lower California, and finally landed
about where La Paz is now. He landed smack in the heart
of the pearling beds.

There is more to the story, of course. There is lots of gore
and all that sort of thing, which I may enjoy describing later.
But the point is that the synonymy of pearls and La Paz is a
very ancient synonymy. And here it was just my luck to come
In at the death of it.

My mind had been all set on describing the pearling fleets.
With any sort of luck I had hoped to make a cruise on one
of the diving vessels. Well, I can still describe the pearling
fleet of La Paz. Much of the fleet lay high, dry, and. rotting

BRINGING WATER TO LA PAZ

READING FROM TOP TO BOTTOM, MAX MILLER AND FRIEND

THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL 149

upon the peninsula across the bay. I can still describe the
diving equipment. It was all stacked inside a board fence
next to the water front. Here were the diving pumps rust-
ing and weathering much after the order of the Little Tin
Soldier.

Nor does there seem much use for the diving pumps to
wait, duty-bound, for the summons to go into action again.
According to the stranded old pearlers around town, there
will be no more action. The stricken pearl-oyster beds ap-
pear unable to make a comeback. Periodically, while I was
in La Paz, scouts would return to town with a report that
the oysters were growing once more. But to La Paz such
reports already were becoming an old story. Yes, some of the
oysters could be detected as growing but only for a short
time, and only until they reached a certain size (too little for
commercial pearls), and then they would all die off again,
killed by the mysterious epidemic, or blight, or whatever
it is.

The prevailing rumor in La Paz is that some Japanese
experts are responsible. Nor does the war have anything to
do with the theory. It was circulated a year before Japan
became an enemy. The theory, in fact, was circulated as
soon as the beds began dying. Some of the pearlers had seen
strange goings-on by Japanese fishermen prior to the epi-
demic.

La Paz, with its natural-colored pearls as well as its white
ones, had remained the one serious rival to Japan's pearl-
culturing industry. Colored pearls, the blacks and the blues,
cannot be deliberately cultured. For this reason the colored
pearls were becoming more valuable and more in demand
than white ones. The buyer of a colored pearl knew he was

150 THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL

not buying a cultured one. And the pearls of La Paz were
noted for their colors. Japan, so they say in La Paz, began
less and less to like the idea. It could prove serious. It could,
in brief, knock the stilts from under the culture-industry.

So La Paz, for the first time in the four centuries of his-
tory, has no more pearls. The pearl-oyster beds behave as
if inoculated with a poison, a poison which has spread from
a few diseased oysters in one bed to all the others.

The pearlers can understand how such a thing might have
happened naturally in a single bed. But they cannot under-
stand how it could have happened in all of the well-known
beds, hundreds of miles apart, simultaneously.

The pearlers don't know. Nobody in La Paz knows. And
so it was a town of sadness which I entered. It was a medieval
town as well. It was as medieval as the seventeenth century.

The old map-makers who pictured Lower California as
an island were not so mistaken in a way. Emotionally, Lower
California is still an island. Its few people behave like island
people. They are more separated from the mainland of
Mexico than are we in the United States. In the same spirit
the Mexicans of the mainland know little about the Mex-
icans of Lower California. The people of Lower California
all these years have had to look out for themselves. Nor can
I say they have tried very hard.

Of course, there are some industrious families living in
Lower California, There are some families with all the
pioneering perseverance of great people. As an orator would
say, they or their forefathers have wrested little private
dynasties out of the wilderness. Yet the very fact that I can
close my eyes and name these few exceptional families, and
count them on the buttons of my coat, is more or less proof

THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL 151

of what I mean about Lower California In general.

The peninsula Itself has lacked a real winning champion
for the peninsula's own sake. This is why the roads are as
they are. This Is why there is no railroad. This Is why Lower
California, by and large, is still a burro-country at heart try-
ing Its best to get along with cars.

I am not referring so much to the border towns of Ti-
juana, Mexicali, Tecate, or even to the semi-border town of
Ensenada. I am referring to the heart and lungs of the un-
tapped interior and to the semi-tropical Cape Region, In-
cluding as it does La Paz, the capital of the Southern Dis-
trict. La Paz, which could be everything, today has nothing
except excuses. Here the people do not even care enough
about living to raise gardens for themselves. The climate is
comparatively healthy for the semi-tropics, but the people
are sick. In La Paz, with remarkably good water, the people
are very sick. The climate is as dry as a desert much of the
year, yet tuberculosis is all over the town. The lack of gar-
den food is one reason, the lack of milk another. Nor could
I see any reason for these conditions beyond the dearth of
initiative.

The summer's evil storm was blamed. There is always
something to be blamed. But La Paz was that way before the
storm. It's a town which still waits for its supplies to come
by boat across the Gulf from the mainland. Sometimes the
boats do not come on time, and then the wait Is longer.
Sometimes the expected vessels do not come at all. When
I was In La Paz the Campeche didn't come at all. She was
due with 450 tons of cargo from Mazatlan, but was burned.
What hurt us most in La Paz was the loss of the much-needed
beer and tequila she was bringing.

152 THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL

I realize, to be sure, that I am describing La Paz back-
ward. I should have started with my first day's arrival, and
have gone on from there. But here was one town of could-be
importance which did not have to wait to have its secrets
revealed. The rest of my prolonged stay, in fact, served only
to verify my first hour's impressions. All of us occasionally
have met people like that. We know all about them the first
hour, and then it becomes a case of trying to figure how
they got that way. We want to know the background, or
whatever it was that put such a quirk in their nature.

The Hotel Perla is the place to stay. For an American
there's no other choice unless he wishes to rent a room with
a Mexican family or live in a Mexican board-and-rooming
house. This is all right, of course, except for an American
it's not all right socially. But there, I've gone and used the
wrong word again. For I do not mean to be uppity. I merely
mean that the Mexicans themselves expect an American to
stay in the Hotel Perla. If he doesn't stay there when he first
arrives, then he's in La Paz for no good reason. He's under
suspicion.

The very fact he's in La Paz makes him under suspicion.
The reason is simple: now that pearl-buyers no longer come
to La Paz, why would anybody come to La Paz? For some
selfish or sinister reason? I, for instance, was assumed to be a
spy. But as a spy for what or for whom, I never was able to
learn. But that made no difference. It's the town's game,
and it's a very ancient game, and each visitor is expected to
play his part. He's supposed to go around acting the way a
spy ought to act.

The town, to repeat, is medieval. Its name alone has the
prestige of history. Its cobbled streets have the firmness of

THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL 153

age. Its low adobe or stone buildings, each with its grilled
windows, were not built overnight. The Hotel Perla alone is
comparatively new. Great things were expected of the Hotel
Perla, and its very name tells why. Its name also tells why
the hotel was built just too late. When I was there the hotel
was existing partly on a government subsidy. But the hotel
does contain God's gift to La Paz; it contains shower-baths
in each room. And the rooms, though not large, are clean
and airy. But the food, though the best in town, is still La
Paz food. That is, it contains few natural items, fresh from
the soil or the sea.

I think this present war will in time bring changes to La
Paz and to the grim attitude of its people. Yet I am not too
sure about it. La Paz, with its medieval background and all,
is different from any Mexican town or capital I ever have
been in. The pro-Nazi attitude was by no means a rarity
anywhere in Lower California. And La Paz decidedly had
her share of it. But the moment the Japanese revealed their
hand revealed in no uncertain terms that they would like
to get Lower California, the war assumed a different aspect,
not only for La Paz, but for all the natives of Lower Cali-
fornia.

For a Mexican, no matter what might have been said of
him in his indifference toward the fate of other countries,
does love his own. He has proved it from the beginning. He
will die for it. The Mexican troops which have now been
sent from the mainland to help watch the coastline of Lower
California are not the barefooted troops we have so often
seen pictured in Mexican revolutions. These troops are
comparatively smart and quick in their tin helmets and
their boots.

154 THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL

Even La Paz, forgotten though she is (ever since she lost
her pearls), now has a reason to take the war seriously. It
might bring a change. It might, too, break that indifference
among certain of her citizens who, when I was there, did not
seem at all adverse to playing both ends against the middle.
A peso, prior to Japan's entree, was still a peso whether of-
fered by Jap, German, or anybody.

During the first of the crisis we had our own uniformed
officers in La Paz as well as elsewhere on the peninsula. They
were there in an advisory capacity. Yet the Mexican psy-
chology is a psychology of pride, both in its own soldiering
and in its own desire to run its own country. American
civilian orators who dictate that our own officers should do
the dictating are, in turn, coming mighty close to dictating
us right out of a much-needed friend.

The presence of a few more Americans in La Paz today
may help to offset the mistrust with which Americans have
been regarded there. A lot will depend on the Americans
themselves, naturally, and how they behave about it. But I,
for one, have confidence in their ingenuity to do all right.
They are not spoiled tourists with more money than sense.
Nor are they there for the purpose, as has happened twice
before in La Paz, of taking Lower California away from
Mexico.

These two incidents, though old now, still burn deeply
down there and are still remembered there.

La Paz, then, through its triple-play of bloody years from
Ximenez to the pirates to the filibusters, has had cause per-
haps to be mistrustful. And maybe this mistrust of all stran-
gers has become, generation after generation, more hered-
itary with La Paz than deliberately intended.

THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL 155

But in fairness to La Paz, all this background was some-
thing for me to consider as I strolled along the famed Male-
con facing the ancient bay and wondered why so few
people in La Paz ever smiled.

CHAPTER 16

IN LA PAZ I got off to a bad start socially. It was on account
of the troublesome money-belt which I am not accustomed
to wearing. It became unfastened during my first social en-
gagement, and slipped down one of my legs.

This engagement consisted of being allowed to prom-
enade along the Malecon with the Good Girls of the town.
La Paz is feudal. The unmarried women are divided into
two camps, the so-called aristocrats being the Good Girls.
They have a harder time of it, for they are more intelligent
than the system which confines them. Most of them at some-
time or other have attended a convent in the United States
and so know English.

But after that it's tough on them. They are sent back to
La Paz, where again they are helpless. They are smart but
just the same they are helpless. They are restricted as to
whom they can marry and with whom they can be seen talk-
ing. As for men, they haven't much choice. The bright boys
of La Paz, those with ambition, get out of town as soon as
they can to try to make names for themselves on the main-
land. They enter law firms or business firms in Mexico City.
They can't stand the gaff of La Paz antiquity.

The "upper class" girls, however, have to stand it. This
leaves them marooned back in La Paz in the manless com-
panionship of their own group.

These daughters of the old residents of so-called social
standing are allowed by their parents to work, but only if the

156

THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL 157

secretarial job Is with the government or In the firm of a
close relative. That is the end of It.

In the evenings this marooned group, for Its one enjoy-
ment of the day, Is allowed to stroll along the Malecon. This
is the well-lighted street along the bay in front of the Hotel
Perla. They can stroll together along this street as long as
they remain in a group, and as long as they do not talk or
nod to other promenaders not of their class.

How I stand socially, whether low or still lower, I never
have had any conception even in my own country. But in
La Paz I was even at a greater loss. For there positively is no
medium there. Nor In La Paz does money, what little there
is of it, serve necessarily as the criterion. As to money stand-
ards La Paz is mixed up. It is more or less a one-company
town controlled by what the townspeople call with varied
emotions "the House of Ruffo." I should like to have learned
more about this old-time family, Its enterprises operated
mostly today by brothers; but the brother I was supposed to
see and the one whom I was told I would like was off In Mex-
ico City. And one of the elder brothers, whom I did see once
when our truck was being repaired in his garage, seemed a
little vague about ever wanting to see me again. So I let It
go at that. My first impression In La Paz could not have
served as a come-on, either. I had not just stepped off a vessel
or a yacht, the way most people reach La Paz. And my
clothes, containing as they did soil specimens from the en-
tire peninsula, apparently classified me right where I be-
longed.

Yet it was just one of those moments when I would like to
have heard somebody In La Paz say anybody in La Paz say
"What! You really don't mean you reached here over-

158 THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL

land? Well, well, well, If that's the case, let's all have a
drink.** But it didn't happen. Nothing much happened. Yet
already I could catch the undercurrent, the La Paz under-
current, that I, being a stranger, was therefore somebody to
be watched.

It was later, after I had washed off the Magdalena Plain
under the beloved shower in the Hotel Perla, that a young
American, C. C. Kemper, introduced himself to me. He was
a chemist in La Paz handling the shark-liver Investment of
his firm. A chemical graduate of I forget where he was
precocious. He was amazing. Although comparatively new
to La Paz, he already was aware of all the business intrigues
of the town. Also he was on the in "socially."

This meant that it was all right for the Good Girls of La
Paz to be seen talking with him. It meant, too, that if I be-
haved myself a formal introduction might somehow be
chartered or plotted and, with luck, be carried through. It
was not so much a promise as a scheme. He had everything
to lose everything and so on my second or third day I
listened grimly to the plan he had worked out. It sounded
like the secret plan for a nautical engagement.

Exactly at nine o'clock that evening the Good Girl group
would be allowed to assemble from its respective homes.
Precisely at 9:10 the little squadron, by moving at an esti-
mated speed of four minutes to the block, should reach a
spot on the Malecon directly opposite the Hotel Perla. Our
own force, by having departed from the Hotel's porch
slightly before 9:10, should by this time have reached the
same spot on the Malecon. But we must be nonchalant about
it and must make it look like an accident. The Good Girl
squadron already was informed of the minute details of the

THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL 159

plans and, through him as the spokesman, to them and their
chaperones, had accepted the terms. Yet we still must make
It look like an accident. This would give their leaders an
out for any further contact with me If I should prove my-
self uncouth.

Never before had I been a debutante in a coming-out. It
was all so new, It was all so awe-Inspiring, that nerves may
have been responsible in part for what happened.

Everything went according to schedule. We began walk-
ing along the Malecon. I lived through the introductions,
cold, severe, precise. I had been paired off and was now rig-
idly moving along, eyes dead-center. My previous instruc-
tions forbade me to touch the Good Girl's elbow. But on
my second meeting, If all went well, I might be allowed
with her permission to assist her delicately off and up
curbings.

And as God is my witness (God and the other American)
I did all I possibly could do to prove my worthiness. Yet It
was around here sometime that my money-belt began slip-
ping. I could feel it slipping. And then, quite suddenly, It
did more than that. It became completely unfastened, one
end dangling down to the street through my trouser leg.

I did not know the Spanish word for money-belt. Even if
I had, who would have believed it? So far as the chaperones
were concerned, my underpants were dropping. Three
inches of the belt already dangled upon the pavement be-
hind my left heel, and the length was becoming longer the
more we walked.

I tried stepping on the money-belt to pull it all the way
out, one way or another. But my efforts, Instead of being of
assistance, merely gave me a mincing step.

l6o THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL

"Pardon me," I finally said.

The squadron lowered its eyes.

Quickly I stooped and snatched at the dangling end. But
the hook-clip would not come free from its new hold on the
fabric inside my trousers.

I pulled from the bottom down, but there was nothing I
could do about it except silently admit defeat. This meant
boldly turning my back upon the squadron and working
from the top down. It meant working down through my
trousers, a most difficult procedure while trying to keep
them on at the same time.

But there was no triumph in my final success; only the
continued silence.

"Look," I begged. "It really is TOO a money-belt!" I
showed the belt to them. In bad Spanish I even tried to
explain its operations. I opened one of its pockets, and
showed the little money inside. I

But why prolong it?

I turned about and returned alone to the Hotel Perla
across the street.

But I must add, that through the perseverance of the
young chemist and through another American friend, O. M.
King, a prospector born in Mexico, I was gradually forgiven
the money-belt horror.

And then I was given a second chance, for the Good Girls
of the town went out on a sort of rebellion while I was there.
Weary of their chains, they did an awful thing. They held
a picnic.

The picnic was held during the evening of a full moon
inside a run-down orchard within the edge of La Paz. The
guest-list included, I would say, eighteen Good Girls (or

THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL l6l

about all there were, aristocratically speaking) and they
were so frightened about their defiance to the town that
the headlights of the car which relayed them to the orchard
were kept dark. It was terrible w r hat they were going to do.
They were going to eat homemade tamales and and and
possibly sing a little.

The male guest-list included, aside from us three Amer-
icans, two of the Good Girls' more daring friends. One of
them could play the guitar. The other was a bright official
from the mainland who, having seen the rest of the world,
was able to laugh at the feudalism of La Paz. He was all for
the rebellion.

So there we were, four men and eighteen town-frightened
women. It would seem, of course, to be one of those set-ups
which all males dream of having especially in Mexico. It
would seem too, from all we have heard, that the one thing
that is welcome in Mexico anywhere at any time is guitar
music. But we were not in San Borjas, nor on Mexico's main-
land.

In La Paz all outdoor music for the most part had con-
sisted of the practice lessons of the military drum-and-bugle
corps. These lessons started slightly before dawn when
everybody was still sleeping. They continued until every-
body was awakened, the members of the practice corps be-
ing drawn from recruits.

In the orchard we ate the homemade tamales. Excellent
though they were, some of the more frightened women had
difficulty, I am afraid, tasting what they were eating.

The Mexican with the guitar started his music softly. But
he did not, apparently, start softly enough. He should
merely have pretended he was touching the strings without

1 62 THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL

actually touching them. On his second piece, a bundle of
cops arrived out of nowhere alongside the orchard fence
and declared a halt to the music.

"Why?" The question was asked humbly by the Mexican
with the guitar.

Because, the cops said, one of the sub-secretaries of one of
the sub-secretaries of one of the town's officials was sick in
bed. His home was way over on the other side of La Paz
somewhere, but in reverence to his illness, why had we the
effrontery to play a guitar?

It was obvious, of course, that any excuse at all would
have served to halt the picnic. It was obvious, too, that wind
already had leaked out regarding the terrible rebellion
planned by the Good Girls. And the time to strike, the time
to squash the revolution, was not in the middle of a song,
but right at the beginning of it.

This at least is how wars are supposed to be won. And
La Paz won this one. There was nothing to do except for all
of us to go home.

CHAPTER 17

THERE \VAS one man in La Paz whom I liked Immediately.
He was M. L. Cornejo, of the old Cornejo family, famed
for its pearling. There was nothing of the little tin god
about him, nor did he try to surround himself with the im-
portance of mystery. But his office, facing the water front,
was filled with the sad relics of those days, such a few years
ago, when half-a-dozen pearling fleets annually would be
leaving La Paz of an October to return again in May. And
great would be the excitement with each return.

These were the days when La Paz would be filled with
the bustle of foreign buyers. When the divers, each with his
tenth-share of the pearls and the mother-of-pearl, would
come ashore to get drunk, to dance, to raise hell. They would
have been at sea more than seven months for the pearling
fleets of La Paz worked regularly all the waters as far south
as Mazatlan on the mainland, and as far north as Santa Ro-
salia on the peninsula.

But today the pearling boats which are not beached and
wasting have been converted into fishing smacks, and some
of the divers are trying to make a living catching shark liver.
No longer is there any whooping or hollering along the
beach of La Paz. For the shark liver business is one which
has sneaked up on the Mexican fishermen, and they are still
surprised and bewildered about it. They can't understand,
for instance, why they are not paid as much for the livers
as the payment made afterward in the United States on de-

163

164 THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL

livery. The argument between the buyers and sellers goes
on and on. Nor can the fishermen understand, either, why
the livers aren't worth as much the year around as they are
during two months of the spring when they are at their best
for the vitamin qualities wanted.

The wrangling continues constantly and, although some
fifteen hundred tons of livers are usually shipped out during
a season, the industry lacks the verve of the old pearl-diving
days. Besides, precedent and all the traditions of the ages
had given to pearl-diving a dignified and definite form of
procedure. The divers had known exactly where they stood
with pearl-diving. But with shark livers the fishermen do
not know. Changes occur rapidly day by day. And it's the
one business, too, where the buyers are the ones who do the
begging. They furnish the oil-cans and sometimes the fish-
ing equipment to the fishermen, and then they can only
trust to God that the livers will not be sold by the fishermen
to a higher-bidding rival.

Nor are the buyers ever sure that the equipment will be
returned. It is surprising how so many fishermen return
from sea with a woebegone report of how all the borrowed
oil-cans were lost overboard. But when one walks along the
fishermen's village on the northern edge of La Paz, he will
see the little verandas festooned with oil-cans bearing potted
flowers.

Obviously the whole business never will become as pic-
turesque as pearl-diving wherein a good Yaqui diver (Yaqui
divers from the mainland were always the best whether div-
ing naked or in diving-suits) could earn anywhere from two
thousand to three thousand pesos a season then, whiff it
would go as soon as his feet touched the shore of La Paz.

THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL 165

Yet if the shark liver business is ever put on a stable basis,
La Paz, the town without hope but with a thousand possi-
bilities, may have some sort o answer for the future. For the
shark meat itself can be cured and dried and sold in Mexico.
It's put on the markets of Mexico's mainland with no at-
tempt at disguise. The grain is similar to that of a swordfish,
but the shark tastes more fishy. There's not much meat left
to a shark, actually, after the head, jaws, tail, and liver have
been removed. Only about forty pounds of edible meat is
left in a good-sized shark. For the liver of a shark alone is
comparatively an immense thing which takes the place of a
lot of organs. The Gulf waters contain other fish which also
have vitamin qualities, and the liver buyers are now trying
to educate the fishermen in the types.

So, to repeat, it all may work out in time, even though
vitamins will never replace pearls.

Senor Cornejo told me that his own most valuable sale
was a dark blue button pearl sold to a Frenchman from
Paris in 1927 for $20,000. The American market was never
much of a pearl-market, Senor Cornejo explained, not be-
cause the Americans didn't want the pearls. A heavy duty
was required to get the pearls into the United States whether
the pearls were sold or not. But Europe required no such
duty, and the European buyers at one time had their own
boat to follow the La Paz fleets around from pearl-bed to
pearl-bed.

Senor Cornejo remembers the time when he was still a
youngster, his father sent him from La Paz to New York
with some pearls to sell. But when he was crossing the bor-
der at Loredo, Texas, the United States customs officials
had no idea how much the pearls were worth. So the officials

l66 THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL

summoned a little jeweler from the town to examine the
pearls and make an estimate. The little jeweler, whose job
really w y as to fix glasses, had never handled real pearls either.
He would not have known the difference between a real
pearl and an artificial one.

"But I've always admired the little fellow's courage,"
said Cornejo, whose family had been handling pearls for
two generations or more. "Yes, I admired his courage. For
do you know w r hat he said? I'll tell you what he said. But first,
you understand, I already had submitted my own listed
value of the individual pearls. So the little jew r eler looked
at my own listed values, then pretended to be examining
the pearls thoroughly. Then he said to the Customs officers
this is what he said: 'Well, some of these pearls are assayed
too low. Some too high. But the average is about what he has
here/ Isn't that good, though? Don't you think that was
clever?"

It must have been good, all right, Inasmuch as Cornejo
has remembered the incident ever since a boy. He still has
the receipt In his La Paz office of the $700 duty paid merely
to get those pearls across the border for a possible sale. In
New York he sold only two of them. The others he brought
back to La Paz, but the duty had to remain paid on all of
them anyhow. "Which is why," he added, "as I told you, the
United States was never a pearl-dealers' market."

Experience has shown Cornejo, though, that the pearl
capital changes after each war. He remembers how the cap-
ital, both for pearls and for mother-of-pearl, has shifted from
Hamburg, from Vienna, from Paris, and from London. He
doesn't know where it will be next, of course, nor is there
any special reason for his wanting to know. He, too, is among

THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL 167

those who are convinced that the Japanese may have had
something to do with the poisoning of the La Paz pearl-
oyster beds.

"Those Japs have known all about pearls since the begin-
ning of time/' Cornejo emphasized. "Why couldn't they
have inserted some crazy germs inside a few live oysters in
each bed? And then let the germs spread? I'm not saying it
could be done. But then I'm not saying that it couldn't be
done. If this had ever happened before, then I might say it
was just another epidemic. But it's never happened before.
Never in all the hundreds of years of pearling around here.
It just never " He finished by hunching his shoulders.

Even as Senor Cornejo and I were talking, there on the
water front street in front of his office, an old Yaqui came up
to us. He nodded a greeting, and stopped to listen.

"One of my former divers," Cornejo said. The old diver
stood there a long time, just standing there listening, but
saying nothing. His world also had ended.

Within a fenced-in yard next to Cornejo's office was the
abandoned equipment of all the La Paz pearlers. I counted
at least twenty diving pumps there, all arranged side by side,
gradually turning into rust.

I asked Cornejo if I could photograph him standing be-
side this abandoned equipment. He consented. I was about
to ask him, too, if he would mind smiling a little just for the
sake of the picture. But fortunately I checked myself in time.
Any other background might be suitable for a smile, but
not that one. It was the one place where a native could be
forgiven the customary stonelike pose.

A strange quirk about the people of La Paz is that they
never dwell on their own history. I mean by this that the

l68 THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL

town has few statues (I saw only one) and fewer If any mon-
umental signposts to mark the town's ancient and peculiar
past. Yet it was here in the Cape region of La Paz, and espe-
cially in the harbor of La Paz, where both Californias came
into being.

In any historical city or town, we dislike, of course, being
guided around from monument to monument. We would
much rather scout around on foot and find such markings
on our own. But in La Paz, after failing to find any, I finally
had to ask: "Are there any old relics around here of the
first landings? Or the first forts? Or anything like that?" It
was a weak question, I admit, but the answers were even
weaker.

Some of the park benches along the Malecon had, I no-
ticed, names carved on them. But the names were not of
history. These emblazoned names belonged to the modern
politicians in office when the cement benches were built.
Remembering how the name plates blaze from our own new
post offices at home, I could not say that such advertising was
a trait o Mexican office-holders exclusively.

Still, La Paz, more than any other town in either of the
Californias, was in a sweet position to have the words carved,
somewhere: "Here Is Where California Began." And, for
lack of any outstanding personage to select for the honor,
the statue could have been of some aborigine diver opening
a pearl-oyster and handing it over to a Spaniard. This in
truth is the brunt of the story dating hazily both before and
after 1533.

We cannot blame the citizens of La Paz for not wanting
a statue on the water front of the true discoverer of "the Isle
of California" insomuch as this first discoverer was the pilot

THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL lS

Ximenez, previously mentioned the one who murdered
his captain quite handily with a knife xvhile the captain was
sleeping.

But for all of that, Ximenez did berth the vessel, the little
Conception, in the first harbor he found, the present La
Paz, only at that time he gave the harbor the name of Santa
Cruz. And his men, in the excitement of finding the long-
sought dreamland of pearls, forgot all about their own
safety in the mad scramble to get the pearls from the Indians
there. It all ended in a dog-fight; the sailors wanted not only
pearls from the Indians, but also their women. As a result,
twenty of the men, including Ximenez, were killed on the
beach of La Paz, and that was the beginning of California.

But oddly enough, in La Paz the one record of the past is
the memory of a pirate, revered daily, who so far as I can
learn did not exist. Or he may have existed, but not under
the name he used in kidding the natives. He told them that
he was Oliver Cromwell. But the original natives could not
pronounce it as such; the closest they could come to it being
"Corumuel."

The late afternoon breeze, which today daily brushes in
from the south over La Paz, is named after him the "Cor-
umuel."

This is the breeze which must have speeded his pirate ves-
sel from La Paz out upon her raids. He would wait all day
to make use of this breeze and so they named it after him.
And the town's bathing beach with its little pavilion of
sandstone and wood is named after him also the "Cor-
umuel."

It is said, likewise, that a lot of the families of mixed blood
dwelling in the Cape region are descendants of the corsairs

170 THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL

of old, or of the survivors of galleons from Asia. But I will
not go Into that, for I do not have the proof. It Is only hear-
say. Yet logically there is a basis for the idea, the Cape re-
gion being one of the first important landfalls for the Span-
ish galleons en route to Mexico from Asia. And a lot of these
galleons, as we know, got no farther than the Cape region.
Some were shipwrecked there while desperately in search
of their first fresh drinking-water after their months of cross-
ing the Pacific. The survivors, both Oriental and European,
had to try to live somewhere.

Nor was Cavendish the only English corsair who, after
capturing his first rich prize off Cape San Lucas, turned all
his prisoners loose on the land there. Woodes Rogers did the
same thing in 1709 after capturing the great Nuestra de la
Encarnadon de Singano. Her cargo has been valued by
some accounts as more than a million dollars, by others two
million. But her crew and passengers, after being provided
with one tiny vessel by the pirate, were released on shore to
find their way across to the mainland if possible. It is known
that some succeeded.

It is also known that the buccaneers themselves, including
as they did not only Englishmen but also Frenchmen and
Dutchmen, were not at all adverse to going ashore in the
Cape region and having a good time in the Indian camps.
They got along better with the natives than the Spanish
soldiers ever did. The English, especially, treated the na-
tives as friends, not as slaves, and it was a good business pol-
icy for the English buccaneers to do so.

When Spain had turned the corner, and her power was
on the wane, the waters of her Pacific dominions became
such a free-for-all scramble for all nationalities that the

THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL 171

word piracy, in fact, is hardly the word to apply to all the
skippers who moved in on her vessels and coasts, including
the Gulf of California.

The Dutch pirate, Peter Hyne, for instance, has left a big
name in the Gulf. There is a reason for it. He once captured
a whole Spanish fleet with a cargo valued upward of fifteen
million dollars. And in the bigger harbor of La Paz itself
the name Pichilingue is remembered much more as a shel-
ter for pirates of old than as a former coaling station of the
United States fleet. Pichilingue, though technically an arm
of the greater La Paz harbor, is also a harbor on its own, but
it is not so far from the open sea as the town of La Paz. So
Pichilingue was more convenient for the pirates.

Yet all of this, the pirates, the galleons from Asia with
their mixed crews, the stranded Spanish prisoners all of
this, I am sure, has something to do with La Paz today, and
may even account in part for the strange undercurrent of
mistrust and intrigue which one feels there on first arriving.

But I started out by talking about statues and monuments
in La Paz. Or rather, about the dearth of them there. Yet,
come to think of it, I hardly know what I would answer if
the town were to accept my challenge by saying: "All right,
you name somebody to commemorate/' This may be why
there are so few of the old boys, if any, represented around
town in stone.

A statue of Cortez, usually so convenient in emergencies,
would not fit in La Paz. He didn't do so well there. He hung
around the vicinity about a year trying to establish a per-
manent settlement, but the survivors of his expedition be-
came so mutinous and so discontented that Cortez, for once
in his life, gave up. Pearls or no pearls, La Paz was, in a

THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL

manner of speaking, the Waterloo of his career.

Before personally coming to the peninsula, Cortez al-
ready had wasted fortunes sending out expeditions to the
place. It had become a mania with him. Indeed, as early as
the October of 1524, Cortez already had written to the Span-
ish King:

. * . they tell me that Ciguatan [a name given by the
Indians to the peninsula] is an island inhabited by women
without any men, although at certain times they are visited
by men from the mainland, and if the women bear female
children they are protected, but if males they are driven
from society. They also tell me it is very rich in pearls and
gold, respecting which I shall labor to obtain the truth, and
give your Majesty a full account of it.

Cortez labored, all right. But he went broke doing so.
The third expedition he financed did discover the place,
to be sure, but the expedition brought no returns from it.
The saying goes that Cortez was out of pocket 70,000 castel-
lanos in gold, which may or may not be a lot of gold. But he
already was out this much before he personally went there
and personally lost a lot more there. He went back to the
mainland on the excuse that his wife, thinking he might be
dead, would be grieving for him. This doesn't sound much
like Cortez, but he was desperate to get out of La Paz (still
called Santa Cruz). And the years were not many after that
when, disgraced by the Court of Spain, he died neglected.
A statue of Cortez would hardly do for La Paz.

Nor would a statue of Vizcaino. It is true that Vizcaino,
coming along afterward, did, in a fit of bravado, change the
name from Santa Cruz to La Paz meaning Peace or the

THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL 173

Place of Peace. But he paid for that title immediately after-
ward by being ambushed on the Place of Peace. After losing
a lot o his men he got out too.

Nor would a statue of the great Father Kino do for La
Paz. A statue of him might have served if the soldiers ac-
companying his expedition had not become so frightened of
the Indians* Father Kino, along with a Spanish admiral,
endeavored to establish a permanent camp and Mission in
La Paz. But the frightened soldiers, fearing an Indian up-
rising, invited a lot of the chiefs to a banquet one day. Just
when the chiefs were seated on the ground ready to eat, the
soldiers turned a couple of cannons upon the guests. Then
there really was an Indian uprising. Father Kino and the
Spanish admiral had to flee. Nor did they return to the
peninsula.

Father Kino thought a good deal about returning from
time to time, but he never did. The work which brought
him his fame as "the Padre on Horseback" was on the main-
land. Yet his continued enthusiasm (by letter) for missions
to be established on the peninsula was what actually in-
terested the peninsula's hero of them all Father Juan Sal-
vatierra. He came, he saw, and through his missions he
conquered. And, by not depending on soldiers, he was the
first one to do so.

But the only catch about erecting a statue of Father Sal-
vatierra in La Paz is that he really didn't start in La Paz.
He landed first at what today is Loreto, a goodly distance
up the Gulf, and started his first mission there. This is one
of the reasons why Loreto for so long remained the most
important town in both the Californias as well as being
their capital. It was Loreto in those days always the magic

174 THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL

word Lore to, the hub of the King's Highway on the penin-
sula.

Nevertheless, it Is still our little La Paz of today which
has seen it all. Yet nowhere on this ancient beach of La Paz
could I see a plaque or so much as a fenced-in spot to show
it. The big frigate birds with their slim tails soar over the
harbor as usual, just as In Xlmenez' time. The red-headed
buzzards are the same also. Maybe they are mementoes
enough.

CHAPTER 18

WE MET her in the arroyo of San Bartolo. She had dimples
and she was barefoot. We had just finished pushing the car
through an exceptionally evil mile of sand, and I had
stopped to take a picture of what we had gone through.
She was standing off to one side beside a cactus knoll hold-
ing the hand of what I presumed to be her small brother.
She was a wilderness child. No doubt about that. She could
have been fifteen, or she could have been thirteen. But the
way she stood there silently regarding us is what won us
over.

"Do you/* said the American prospector to us, "see what
I see?"

I was not with the naturalists this time, but with my two
American friends of La Paz: C. C. Kemper and O. M. King.
The naturalists were still out in the fields with the truck
trapping and collecting all over the Gape Region, and hav-
ing enthusiastic fortune.

I wish I had more intelligence in regard to their work
for the Natural History Museum so that I might describe
some of the specimens, both animal and plant, which the
naturalists acquired throughout Lower California before
returning to San Diego. But, as I may have hinted before, I
remained a complete dud about the technicalities of the
work they were doing. Yet, as I had admitted my ignorance
about such matters to them long before we had started the
journey, the equation between us continued working out

176 THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL

all right. They were finding what they wanted away from
the towns and the people, and I was finding what I wanted
among the people.

The two La Paz Americans and I were doing what in
La Paz is called "making the circuit/' This means going
from La Paz to Cape San Lucas, the extreme tip, and back.
We were doing this In Kemper's high-slung little car when
we met the dimpled girl In the arroyo of San Bartolo.

I must emphasize again that the rainy storm seasons of
southern Lower California are the reverse of what they are
In northern Lower California. The time to visit the Cape
region is during late fall and winter. The weather is at its
best then. During such times both La Paz and San Jos del
Cabo, for Instance, wear their best manners. The palms are
quiet and tranquil. All the world of the extreme south
seems lovely. But it is only a come-on. The typhoons and
the chabascos bide their time till summer, and the ones
which had preceded our arrival to the Cape region had been
terrible. The natives did not have to tell us.

Before the storm hit, San Bartolo, between La Paz and
San Jose del Cabo, had been a simple little village on the
edge of a little arroyo. But the storm had changed the quiet
arroyo into a flushing river-bed sweeping out into the Gulf
and depositing a new delta there more than a square mile
in area. A lot of the village of San Bartolo had been swept
along too, and several of the people. This river-bed was now
part of our road to San Jos del Cabo.

The bed was drying, but it was of sand, and the sand was
wet. A small leftover stream continued trickling through
the sand as if innocently declaring: "I really had meant no
harm. Look, this is really all I am at heart. Merely a harm-

THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL 177

less rivulet."

But we had no confidence any more in promises. We
didn't want quicksand, but we found it. There is nothing
to do under such circumstances but dig out, pile our ruts
with brush from the walls of the arroyo, and try again. Ten
miles or more of it we had had in the arroyo of San Bartolo
alone, before we met the girl.

You might well wonder what the Lower California Mexi-
cans do about their roads after such cloudbursts. Even with
their important roads in a capital such as La Paz. The an-
swer is they wait for God to heal all. After such a storm they
prefer to burn candles in church rather than to heat asphalt.
La Paz had been divided clean by two new arroyos when
I first arrived. The two arroyos were still there, dividing the
town into sections, when last I left.

Each day, though, a company of soldiers had been
marched out of town for road-repair work. This was the
name given it. The company, shouldering shovels, would
march through the streets. Whatever the distance, it con-
sumed the morning's march. The return was problematical.
Nor could I blame the soldiers their indifference. On the
ledger they would be granted each an additional peso-and-a-
half a day for such work. They were not getting the money.
Somebody else was getting it. And they had known all along
that this would be the way of it. With shovel and wheel-
barrow is the way these roads are built. With promises is
the way they are repaired.

In La Paz I had heard the other side of it, too. I had heard
the side of some engineering delegates, expenses paid, sent
from Mexico City to inspect the storm's damage. They rode
around town in a bright station wagon. I don't know what

178 THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL

they did besides ride around. There was a quarrel going on
between them and the townspeople. The quarrel had
started on the first day and ultimately resulted in an edi-
torial in the town's four-page paper the same paper which
by editorial had denounced the immorality of the Good
Girls for pausing one evening to sit on the beach-sand in
front of the Hotel Perla.

But, as for the members of the storm delegation, they had
told me their side of the story. It had to do with the aloof
way the town had received them. There had been no wel-
coming committee, apparently, no celebration.

"Instead," as one of the members explained in Spanish,
"all the people peeked out their windows at us as if we
might be a band of guerrillas. We could see their heads, but
nobody came out on the street. They were judging our
ability by our clothes."

If the storm's damage to La Paz, and to the roads around
La Paz, had remained as God had willed it to remain, the
damage around San Bartolo had remained equally as sacred.
Yet the little girl with the dimples seemed more concerned
about us than about the suddenly changed landscape around
us.

As she stood there, partly concealed by the cactus, we
asked her name, of course, which in an emergency is always
the way to open a conversation. We ask, and then we forget
the answer. For the answer makes no difference. But I al-
ways will remember her answer. It was Evangelina.

She completely won us over as no siren could possibly
have done. We wanted to shower her with everything, with
candy and pesos. But, standing there in her bare feet, she
had more dignity than we had. Her dimples and the direct

THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL 179

way she answered our questions In Spanish was what got us,
I think.

"By God/' the prospector said to us in English, "I think
I'll adopt her and send her to school. What would they
think back home?"

We all wanted to adopt her, just to have her around, to
show her off, just as she was. The props, though, would be
the difficulty. For they would have to go along with her,
the sand and the cactus, and likewise the whole of the San
Bartolo arroyo. The fixtures all went together, none com-
plete without the other.

An old woman came along, quite by surprise from out of
the brush. She was ragged, she was skinny. Her face was
sharp.

"Ah," I whispered in English. "There's the witch to
climax the fairy story."

We greeted her in Spanish. She greeted us. She came
closer to peer at us. Her eyesight must not have been too
good. She looked us over, and apparently we did not seem
dangerous. Her grin was one of amazing relief. The sharp-
ness fell from her face.

"You look frightened, mother/' the prospector said in
Spanish. "You even scared me."

"I was frightened a little." The old woman's Spanish
was happy now. "The girl, you see, is not yet ready for men."

"And you were afraid of us?"

"I didn't know, sir. I didn't know."

"Well, you should be afraid," one of us laughed. "She's a
beautiful girl." We were all laughing now, even the old
woman. "You should be proud to have a daughter like that."

We had intended this as a compliment, allowing her the

l8o THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL

opportunity to deny It by saying she was the grandmother.

"Ah, yes/* she said. "Ah, yes. But I'm not the mother/*

"Really, you're not the mother? But you're too young to
be the grandmother. Really, you must not joke with us."

"Ah, no, sir. I wouldn't joke. I'm neither the mother nor
the grandmother. Her whole family was washed out with
the flood. She lives with me now."

I gulped on that one, and I presume the other two Ameri-
cans must have gulped also. We turned to the girl.

"Is that true?" It was asked more out of politeness to
get her back in the conversation.

"Yes, sir," she answered in Spanish. "It is true. And the
boy " She pulled the boy's hand. We hardly had been
noticing him. "And the boy, too, lives with us here. And
there are five others."

"All from the same family?"

"Oh, my no," the girl answered. "All from different fami-
lies. She is caring for all of us, sir. She is our mother now.
It was quite a flood, sir, in this arroyo."

We tried to think of something to answer to that one,
but the only answer I can remember any of us being able to
make was a weak: "I imagine it must have been."

The old woman asked if we would like to visit her home,
a hut higher to the south on a hill. But we couldn't leave
our car standing in the arroyo. Then the woman I had
called a witch (I could have cut my arteries) came over
and whispered to us. She evidently didn't want Evangelina
to hear.

"I think, sirs/' the old lady whispered, "she's a beautiful
little star in the sky, too. And you've made us happy. Now
God be with you on the journey. Good-bye."

i-*" 1 x

S 5

Z M

< or

- ?

THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL l8l

"Good-bye."
"Good-bye."

"Good-bye'* this last from the boy, his first and last word
to us.

CHAPTER 19

THE WHOLE shape of the peninsula, with its coastline knobs
and all, is somewhat like an Irish shillelagh. The Cape
region corresponds to the handle. The upper fingers would
wrap around the indenture which forms the Bay of La Paz.
The knuckles would ride high on the peninsula's southern-
most bunch of mountains, the Sierra de la Victoria. These
mountains are lofty, ragged, and green. Some natives say
that mountain sheep can be found on them, but I didn't
see any. Around the base are the villages.

Besides having its own private rainy season in summer,
the Cape region also has its own heat and its own foliage.
The place is a cross between desert and tropics, the tropics
predominating. Sugarcane grows almost anywhere for the
planting. There are small bananas, too, and coconuts, and
the famed tomatoes of Todos Santos. But there also is cactus
desert cactus. Stir them all together, turn on the heat to
boil, season with a generous quantity of naked youngsters,
and you will have the Cape region.

The huts are of matting except in the older villages such
as San Jos< del Cabo. Here they are of adobe within the vil-
lage, but of matting on the edge.

So well known is San Jos del Cabo as a cargo spot that
one would presume the town had a harbor. It has neither
a harbor nor a wharf. But it does have one of the longest and
whitest beaches in the south. The beach runs on forever
almost to the Cape itself. All cargoes have to be relayed

182

THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL iSg

ashore, and only during the calm season. For there is no
protection. Cargoes have been upset and lost here during
high surfs. There are several stories about such accidents,
one of them involving an upset lighter bearing a car or two
toward shore.

San Jose del Cabo is proud of its outdoor theater in the
plaza of the high school. This theater, as the first place to be
shown, corresponds a little in philosophy to the Hollywood
Bowl. In San Jose del Cabo the local people don't expect a
visitor to look first of all at the old Mission. But the outdoor
stage in the plaza of the high school is revered. For the stage
has a backwall of bands of loud colors. The colors flare up-
ward not unlike the rays of the setting sun. This theater is
named after a composer whose name I felt sure I would
remember. But as I do not use a notebook when talking
with Mexicans the sight of a pencil may give them stage-
fright I have forgotten it. He is, though, the one who
composed ''The Waves," and it seems I should have known
all about him.

The young teacher carried a paper parasol as a shield
against the sun. Her print dress appeared so cool, and she
herself was so pretty, that with her consent I took her pic-
ture standing in front of the stage. I promised to mail her
a copy of the picture after it was developed, and this is why
I have her name. She wrote it down: "Carmen Presichi C."
But the picture did not turn out as clear and as cool as she
had seemed when standing there in the plaza in the sun,
and I use this as an excuse for not having sent the picture
yet.

The man to see in San Jose del Cabo is Valerio Gonzales
Canseco. He owns the mercantile store. He owns too, I

184 THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL

think, most of the town. In his station wagon he drove us
the two miles from the town to the beach where, In season,
his cargoes are unloaded.

I wanted to tell him that during the early part of the pre-
vious World War I had gone swimming on this same beach
in company with others of our subchaser crew, Subchaser
312. We had been on our way from Bremerton to the Pan-
ama Canal and then to the war zone. We had anchored off
San Jose del Cabo to obtain, if I remember correctly, some
desperately needed limes. Anyhow, we had gone swimming
on this same beach, and the scars of our sunburns remained
with us indefinitely. The blistering beach of San Jose del
Cabo had been too much of a change from the fogs of
Bremerton.

I would have told Valerio Canseco about the memory,
but what was the use? Too many more surprising things
have happened to our world since then. But not, apparently,
to San Jos del Cabo.

Except for the new outdoor stage with its upright colors,
the hot little town is still the same hot little town. The bar
across from the bandstand is still the same bar also with
the same saddle burros lining the hitching rack outside.

San Jos6 del Cabo is a malaria town. There are two out-
right malaria villages in Lower California, the other being
Mulege. As in Mulege, it is well not to spend the night in
San Jos del Cabo unless one first has been drugged with
quinine or has his own netting. The lagoons are the guilty
ones, and the semistagnant ditches.

In a lagoon off the beach at San Jos del Cabo two naked
boys were paddling a raft. They should have been in school.
But already I had learned how boys get out of going to

THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL 185

school in the Cape region. There's an art to It which I'll
pass along for the benefit of the little boys In the United *
States. They might be able to make something of it.

In the Cape region all children are obliged by law to go
to school. They must, however, wear clothes to school. This
is another law. So the boys in some of the Cape villages say
they have no clothes. They prove the assertion by spending
their days around the water naked. When they grow to the
size where complete nakedness might become embarrassing,
even to them, the next out is to say they can't go to school
because they now are of an age where they must help sup-
port their parents. The boys say they now are their fathers*
assistants, and as such must help with their fathers* boats.

But the girls, alas, have no such out. All girls usually must
go to school.

I tried taking a picture of these two naked boys on the
raft. But they behaved as if I were a truant officer wanting
evidence. They paddled away furiously, and then jumped
overboard. But they would, I knew, have to rise again for
air. I waited. They climbed back upon the raft. Seeing me
still waiting, they jumped overboard again. It turned into
a game, they doing most of the scoring. And most of the
giggling also.

A naked boy in the Cape region does have his paradise
if only he can keep from getting sick. For his dessert he
has the sugarcane. In the fields he has his burros and his
oxen. For his swimming pool he has both the Gulf and the
Pacific combined. The Cape itself is the hub of all things
down there. Where the two waters meet is the focus point
and the direction-finder both at sea and on land. The spot,
as much as anything else, may have given the name Call-

1 88 THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL

fornia to both the Californlas.

I should have asked the pretty schoolteacher at San Jose
del Cabo, the one with the paper parasol, her own version
of how the name California came Into being. She wouldn't
have known for sure, either. Nobody does. Still, I should
have asked, inasmuch as she was doing all her teaching
within a few hours' distance of the famed Cape itself, the
cause of so much name-guessing.

In Upper California, of course, we generally lean to the
theory that the word California was derived from a roman-
tic tale In which the word California, or something much
like It, was the name given the Queen of the Amazons, sup-
posedly reigning in a distant country. We are told, too,
that this story was much in vogue during the time of both
Columbus and Cortez. I'm not the one to say whether or not
the explorers of that era were as impressed as all that by the
fictitious heroine's name. But some professors, taking their
cue from a paper published by E. E. Hale of Boston in 1 863,
seem to think there may be something to the idea.

Cortez for a fact certainly referred to California as the
'Isle of the Amazons." But this was before he visited the
place. It also had a lot of names besides that one; such as the
"Isle of Pearls," or "Ciguatan," or, again, the "Carolina
Islands" named after Charles II of Spain. Then there was
Drake, who insisted on calling the California coast "New
Albion."

In a showdown, then, one could have paid his money and
have taken his choice.

The early Jesuits had their own theory about the origin
of the name California, and it did not have to do with a
romantic heroine. According to the Jesuits, the origin had

THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL 187

to do with the Cape itself, the headland first sighted. Out
there among the jutting rocks which help comprise the
Cape we still can see the ancient cove and the ancient arch
which the Jesuits talked about in their name-theory. The
stormy seas which strike the Cape have not as yet torn away
these old landmarks.

But the one catch to the Jesuits' name-theory is that the
word California becomes involved both with the Latin
meaning as well as with the Spanish. In Spanish the word
for cove is cola. In Latin the word for arch is fornix. Put
them both together as Cortez is rumored to have done on
first seeing the cove and the arch so close together on sight-
ing the Cape and the result is cala-y-fornix. Or "cove-and-
arch."

Yet Cortez himself questioned that one.

There's still a third explanation, and perhaps a simpler
one, which I have seen somewhere. If the word fornix is re-
placed with fornax .> the latter meaning furnace or furnace-
heat, the combination then would be cala'y fornax. This
explanation is easier to picture when seeing the Cape itself.
For the arch, when hit just right by the sun, does blaze like
a furnace, just as Cortez may have seen it. As for the heat
of the Cape, he could not have had much difficulty feeling
it. So again it could have been Callida fornax: making a
fourth try at the name.

The road from San Jos< del Cabo swings directly east the
few miles to the Cape, then makes a back-loop. The diminu-
tive settlement at the very tip of Cape San Lucas is called
But what else could it be called except San Lucas?

The settlement is hardly as large as its name. Yet it was
even smaller during our visit because of the late summer's

l88 THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL

disastrous torrents which had wrecked not only the road
bordering the Cape, but also the communities along this
circular highway.

San Lucas is this sort of village: the man who is the village
dentist is also the village barber and the village blacksmith.
Fishing boats make use of San Lucas, but this is about all.
Near-by San Jos< del Cabo has stolen the play.

In the Cape region the community known as the-town-
where-they-make-leather is Miraflores. The two La Paz
Americans and I slept there inside a house one night. It was
a mistake. It also was my fault. We should have brought our
own folding cots and slept outside.

The younger American couldn't understand why we
weren't being bitten throughout the night as he was. It did
seem unfair. It seemed all the more unfair because I was
the one who had urged that we continue driving and driv-
ing through the darkness until Miraflores was reached. I
wanted to buy some leather. I wanted especially to buy a
pair of Mexican chaps for a gift.

The chaps used by the cowboys of Lower California are
different from any chaps I ever have seen elsewhere. They
are made for coolness as well as for practicability. They are
not enclosed like our familiar Western chaps. The legs do
not go into these chaps as into a pair of trousers. Rather, the
Lower California chaps are huge skirts of leather which are
thrown over the pommel of the saddle. They do not buckle
around the waist of the rider. The legs can be slid under the
protection of the leather skirts, or withdrawn, whenever or
wherever the rider feels he needs the protection. The rest
of the time his legs can be hanging freely outside, cooling

THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL l8g

If the sun Is hot. Or back again under protection if the sun
is altogether too hot, and the brush altogether too sharp.

In fact, in Lower California the equipment of a cowboy
is a study in itself and an art. The horses usually are pro-
tected with heavy leather too, especially with shields across
the chest. The involved equipment of both rider and horse
is not for swank, but it does resemble that of a knight of
old riding into battle. And it is into battle that the cowboys
are riding, battle against a million little spears. The lower
California cowboy also will wear at times high leggings
which lace above the knees. He will need it when riding
down a stray bull or steer in these bristling thickets. His
horse will need every bit of protection as well. In Lower
California the general name for this equipment is "armor,"
The word chaps, though originally derived from the Span-
ish word chaparejos (which in turn is derived from chap-
arral), is not as customarily used in Lower California as the
word "armor," which more or less takes in the whole works.

We can easily see why leather and leatherwork has be-
come of such homemade importance throughout the pen-
insula, and why most of the larger ranches contain a man or
two who is an expert at tanning, tooling, shaping, and dye-
ing. He usually will make his own dyes as well, gathering
the substance from cactus roots or from the bark of trees,
generally from the bark of the palo bianco tree or from the
elephant- tree. For the little stubby elephant-tree is almost as
much a distinguishing feature of Lower California as is the
curious cirio or "candle tree" which grows nowhere else
in the world except on the peninsula and on one island
near it.

Yet as one travels through Lower California the various

THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL

colors of the leather worn by the cowboys change from
district to district. It all depends on the color o the natural
dyes of the vicinity. A cowboy from one section can be rec-
ognized in another section by the color of the leather he is
wearing. In our own country the situation is paralleled, I
would say, by the shape of the cowboy's hat. Through the
shape of his hat alone we can tell, of course, whether he
comes from Texas or Montana or California.

Around Miraflores, for example, the leather was of fairly
light color, though not as light as some of the leather I had
seen in vicinities further north. For my gifts I would have
preferred some of this lighter leather, which is a freakish
cream. But my days in Lower California were drawing to
a close now. I had seen the whole length of the land, and it
was time for me to start thinking of getting back home,
what with a war coming. It also was time for me to stop
thinking of myself for a while and to think of the friends
who had helped see us off. I had utilized all their favors
during the preparations. I wanted for Al Pearce, of the
radio, a pair of Mexican chaps for his patience in trying
to make a photographer out of me before I left. He had
failed, but it wasn't his fault. I wanted for Ray Stoudt, "the
merchant prince," a leather brief case. He had lost sleep
trying to help figure out the maximum of supplies which
could be condensed into the minimum of space. This night
in Miraflores, then, I dedicated to them. For they were the
cause of it.

We reached the village of Miraflores in the dead of night.
As usual, there were no lights anywhere around the square
to guide us. We could have passed right on through the
village without having noticed it was a village except that

THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL IQ1

we knew It must be there. We found a hut and knocked on
the door. We asked In Spanish where we could sleep and
where we could buy leather.

A man hopped upon our running-board and guided us
through the darkness to another adobe home about a half-
mile away. He told us this was the biggest house and that a
lot of people lived there. He was correct. Three families
at least must have been living there. The house was dark
when we drove into the yard. But the sound of our car
caused a candle to be lighted, then two candles, then three.
We could hear children being told to keep quiet and not to
get excited. Dogs were told to shut up. Caged birds were
told to stop their squawking.

"All we want/' we explained apologetically in Spanish,
"is a place to spend the night. We've a couple or so blankets
with us, but no cots. We will pay whatever is customary, of
course, and we are very tired."

"Yes."

"Yes."

"Yes."

The yes's came in Spanish from every direction and from
out of darkened corners. Two parakeets in a cage definitely
decided not to like us, but the other birds quieted down.
A rusty-colored cat, one eye gone, leaped from a rafter onto
my shoulder. Two hens were chased off a living-room bench,
and we were invited to sit down. Our feet disturbed a baby
pig and another cat under the table. A rooster, surprised by
the sudden candlelight, crowed from on top the waterbarrel.

"Yes yes, I'll get cots for you," one of the ladies said.
"Yes yes." She pushed one of the older boys, the one who
was gaping at us the hardest. "Off with you. Get cots."

I g2 THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL

"Where?"

"Don't talk like that," she answered, shoving him again.
"Off with you."

The boy went, dragging a smaller boy with him. A dog
followed them out into the night. The dog favored its left
front leg as if the foot at some time had been caught in a trap.

During the continued excitement we had forgotten about
having mentioned leather to the guide who had brought us
here. Nor were we aw r are he had disappeared until now,
quite suddenly, he reappeared. His arms were loaded with
leather pocketbooks, belts, leather pictureframes, and two
hand-tooled brief cases. I went for the brief cases, and ex-
amined them under the candlelight.

The man told us their prices, and we bought them. The
prices were too reasonable to warrant bickering. This lack
of bickering must have disappointed him. But we were
tired. Even if we had argued and even if we had won,
the difference (after being divided out of pesos) would have
meant only a quarter or so.

*Td like to buy some chaps, too/' I said.

"Chaps?" The man's eyes widened. He was in heaven.
"You mean you mean chaps?" He had not seen so much
ready money for a long time, I guess. Nor, perhaps, had the
families now clustered around the table. The candlelight re-
vealed the excitement in their faces. These people must have
considered us the Second Coming. I cannot say I enjoyed
the sensation. It is no fun waving pesos around in a setting
like that. And yet our exposed wealth, all told, could not
have amounted to more than a few dollars in America.

The man said he would get a pair of chaps. They would
have to be second-hand ones, of course, as new chaps would

THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL

have to be made to order and would require a long time
in the making. But he said he would have a pair of chaps for
me by morning. He vanished out the door. This was turning
out to be a great night for him. He would find a pair of
chaps even if he had to awaken everybody in the village,
even if he had to take them off an uncle or a grandfather.
This was written all over him as he disappeared. He would
take first and explain to the owner later. He would explain
later while dividing the proceeds. Our heaven-sent visit
with pesos in the dead of night would be the topic of conver-
sation long after we left. We were a miracle sent by the
saints. I didn't like the role.

The two boys returned triumphantly with two cots. They
were the huge canvas-backed Sonora cots which do not fold.
The legs are solid and thick.

"Where do you want them, mamma?"

"In that room there/' She indicated the dirt floor of an
open-air annex adjoining the open-air eating quarters. "Put
them there. Now go get another." Excitedly she pushed the
boy. "Go get another." This meant, apparently, that the
boy was to get his old man's. I don't know. But the cot came
in out of the yard from the general direction of the chicken-
coop.

Where the cots had come from and what had been their
previous use, was none of our affair. We were not supposed
to ask. She had kept her promise. Here were three cots. We
tipped the two boys. The candles were blown out. We rolled
in to sleep. We were out, completely bleary, from the hard
driving at night to reach Miraflores.

Or rather, "your Miraflores," as the young shark-chemist
soon started telling me.

1Q4 THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL

"What the hell's the matter with you," I said. "You're
dreaming things. Nothing's biting me. You're just dream-
ing things."

"Maybe nothing's biting you/' he said in sincere anguish.
"No, maybe nothing's biting you BUT!" He leaped off
his cot.

The three of us lit matches to search his blanket. We
searched the canvas.

"See," I said. "There's nothing. Not a thing. You're just
dreaming."

He tried returning to the cot. It was no go. In a moment
he was up again. And again we searched with matches. And
again we could find nothing.

And that is how it went the night through. Now he's up,
now he's down, now he's up But never could we find
anything.

"It's imagination. That's all it is," the prospector and I
both told him. "It's just imagination."

As desperately as the three of us needed sleep none o us
were getting any "just on account of your imagination."

"Just on account of your Miraflores," he answered. It had
turned into a refrain, our accusation and his answer.

Dawn found us still sitting up on our cots. We needed
the welcoming grayness. We searched his cot again in the
new light. Nothing.

"See. Just your imagination."

"I suppose this is imagination." He .was glaring at his
chest and at his belly and at his legs. The dots and lumps
upon him resembled an adobe wall. His skin could have
been used for sandpaper.

And that's what happened to us or rather to him

THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL 195

during our night in the world's most beautifully named
village, Miraflores the mirror of flowers. And all for the
sake of two people, Al Pearce and Ray Stoudt, who I think
should appreciate those leather trivialities more than they
do. If not for me, then at least for the true martyr, Kid
Kernper.

For our breakfast we were served a thick meat-broil. Meat
being such a rarity around there, we complimented our
hosts and hostesses. This was expected of us. It was not that
we cherished facing a meat-broil the first thing in the morn-
ing, but we did know what meat must mean to this family
or to these families.

" We're very lucky," we smiled sleepily, and without
meaning a word of it. "We mustVe arrived just in time to
be so fortunate."

It was what they wanted to hear, and so we said it. They
nodded their approval.

"Thank you, thank you," the mamma smiled. "It was for-
tune. Only two days ago it was, you see, that our cow was
oh! so sick. We knew for sure she could not live."

CHAPTER s>o

ONE OF the chief amusements of Americans visiting Lower
California today is discussing what we would do if we owned
the place. We would make of it another Upper California.
First we would build a decent road the length of the penin-
sula. Next we would build a railroad all the way from San
Diego to the tip of Cape San Lucas. Then we would open
up the mining possibilities.

Next we would build huge dams on such northerly ar-
royos as Santo Domingo, capable of irrigating the whole of
the San Quintin Plain, turning it into an agricultural dis-
trict richer than our own Imperial Valley. At four other
places, too, would we build dams. For the dam sites are there
begging to be used.

Even a blind man can see what could be done with Lower
California if only we had it. Even a blind man can see, too,
how unpopular Americans can become in Lower California
by harping on the subject. For we have had Lower Cali-
fornia that is the joke of it.

The official American flag stayed up over the peninsula
for more than a year. This was in 1847-48. The occupation
was as official as our occupation of Upper California, and
the flag-hoisting occurred approximately at the same time,
the first flag-hoisting in San Diego being only the previous
year, 1846.

Nor am I referring to American filibuster occupations
such as. William Walker's a few years afterward, nor to

196

THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL 197

others before and after him.

But the occasion I mean (and the one which generally is
skipped in our schoolbooks) is when Lieutenant-Colonel
Henry S. Burton, of the United States Army, aij.d Captain
T. Bailey, of the United States Navy, hoisted the flags at
San Jos6 del Cabo and at La Paz. This took care of the
southern end, the important Cape region. Commander
T. O. Selfridge, with the U.S.S. Dale, also shared in the
transaction at La Paz.

Northward, other companies from Colonel Stevenson's
regiment of New York Volunteers were distributed up the
coast as far as Todos Santos Bay, the harbor of today's En-
senada.

There was virtually no fighting. Most of the populace of
Lower California was all for the idea. Or at least they were
as much for it as the original populace of Californians had
been for the same idea in Upper California. When San
Diego had been taken over, for example, the first American
flag to be hoisted had been sewed by the three daughters of
Juan Bandini, an original Californian. The daughters had
ased white muslin sheets and red and blue flannel. The
Californians down in Lower California had been helping
out, too, in much the same spirit.

For Lower California was then, as now, the forgotten land
of Mexico. The people of Lower California were tired of
being orphans. Also they were both bored and weary of
the countless miniature revolutions on the peninsula to
determine who would be governor for the next week.

When the American flags were hoisted most of the Lower
California people welcomed the new turn toward stability.
They welcomed it with dances, music, and speeches. Be-

198 THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL

cause o the bad waters of the Gulf, the Californians of
Lower California had been more isolated from Mexico City
than had been the residents of Upper California. Mexican
officials from Mexico's capital could get to Upper California
easier by horseback than they could get to Lower California
by both horseback and boat. Lower California needed a
government.

So! When the Americans landed with the flag at the south-
ern tip the only objection had been a slight skirmish near
San Jos6 del Cabo. Some Mexicans who had been on the
warpath with their own revolutions now used the new ar-
rivals as a change of targets. This was about all. One day a
group fired at the Americans from ambush. But it was no
battle. One American, Midshipman McLeanahan, was hit
fatally. He was the lone casualty. After that, the group which
did the firing promptly scrammed. Not that they weren't
brave, perhaps, but their movement was the unpopular one.

A few other potshots had been taken elsewhere at Ameri-
cans, too, some at La Paz, again at San Antonio, and again
at Todos Santos. But none of it was any comparison to the
skirmishes in Upper California, especially the Battle of San
Pasqual, behind San Diego, needless and silly though this
affair had been for the possession of Upper California. If the
battle had meant anything to the future, Upper California
could have been lost to the United States. For in this Battle
of San Pasqual the Americans, under General Kearny, had
the hell knocked out of them. But the outcome made no
difference to the American occupation of Upper California
because the majority of the original Californians were all
for the American occupation.

The same attitude had been even stronger in isolated

THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL

Lower California when the American flags had been hoisted
there. But it was the next year when the mystery occurred.
It was the next year, following the hoisting of the American
flags in Lower California, when the surprise order came
from Washington ordering the flags taken down again. The
reason for the surprise order has never been fully explained.
The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (signed February 2,
1848) had something to do with it. But the order went out
to hand back the peninsula to Mexico, who really didn't
care at that time whether she held it or not. It was too far
out of reach.

But the people of Lower California cared. There was a
panic. Especially was there a panic among the Lower Cali-
fornia Californians who had shown the greatest enthusiasm
in accepting the American flag. Without warning they had
been left out upon the well-known limb, and now nobody
down there knew friend from foe.

For their own safety, as many as possible of the former
enthusiasts were loaded aboard the three American war-
ships, Warren,, Southampton, and Ohio, and shipped to Up-
per California to make new homes for themselves. They in-
cluded much of the population. The passengers from La
Paz alone totaled more than three hundred, and the Ameri-
can Government finally had to hand out an indemnity to
each of them.

So our flags went down, but not our endless speculations
about what we would do with Lower California if ever WE
owned it. The same old disc-record has been turning around
and around now for more than a century. The theme-song
has remained the same What We Would Do With Lower
California If Only We Had It. This is the theme, yet every

200 THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL

now and then some variations will be added to meet the
times. As one example, here's an International News Serv-
ice story coming out of Washington December 17, 1941:

Sen. Reynolds (D-NC), chairman of the senate military
affairs committee, today urged that immediate negotiations
be started for aquisition of Lower California from Mexico
as a protection for the Pacific Coast.

Pointing to reports that armed Japanese have been found
on the peninsula that is Lower California Reynolds ex-
pressed fear that Japanese submarines may have bases in
uninhabited portions of the area.

But the idea of annexing Lower California came into
being long before the brief period when we did hoist our
flag there. It is as old as the time when both the Californias
were a no-man's land. The first American whalers to work
the harbors had the notion, and reported it to their succes-
sive presidents. President Andrew Jackson was much in-
terested in the property. His talking-point was the purchase
price of five million dollars.

President Polk not only had the plan, he was the one who
had Lower California.

Secretary Elaine had the same idea. So did President Bu-
chanan. So did President Garfield. But the wildest talking-
point of all, probably, was the one presented to the Ameri-
can Government by J. C. Fremont, when he was territorial
governor of Arizona. He wanted the United States to buy
Lower California as an asylum for the warring Apaches. He
neglected to suggest, though, how the waring Apaches would
first be captured.

I do know that once this war is over, and once we've man-

THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL 2QI

aged to re-obtain the pieces of our own land scattered upon
the Pacific I do know we'll still be saying what we could
do with Lower California if only WE had it.

And I do know, too, that the Mexicans of today will con-
tinue to be just as sick of hearing it.

Lower California itself seems surprised by its own sud-
denly renewed importance. And a little flattered too, I
think.

The prevailing fear that the Japanese may use Lower
California as a springboard for invading Upper California
is, of course, not a new fear. It is as old as I am. Perhaps
older. But the war has brought it all to light again with a
new life.

The shrieking is now to the effect: "Why don't we do
something about it? Why don't we move our troops right
down there and do something about it?"

But the fact that Lower California today is being watched
as closely as our means allow as closely as much of the
United States itself is being watched all of this seems be-
yond the comprehension of the American orators who
would win the war through the simple process of alienating
Mexico's friendship completely.

Yet it's Mexico's war, too, today. The President of Mexico
doesn't have to be told. Nor do the Mexican officers, nor the
Mexican people, exactly cherish having Americans think
only in terms of the United States while considering the
safety of the American Continent as a whole. Nor do the
Mexican people appreciate being browbeaten by American
orators into doing more and how to do it. Or into giving
up more, including (as has been suggested) the land of
Lower California itself. Mexicans just naturally don't like

2O2 THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL

to hear such talk. Nor would we like to hear it if we were
Mexicans.

Mistakes have been made on both sides of the border, of
course. All kinds of mistakes, big and little. But as is quite
natural, we on our side of the border think only of our
benevolences toward Mexico. We even call it at times "our
protective benevolence." We think, too, of our cash gener-
osity to the thousands and thousands of Mexican aliens who
have made their homes on our side of the border and whom
we supported with cash handouts during our own financial
panics. And it has been an item!

In one California county alone, Los Angeles County, the
county government paid an average of $479,200 a year to
care for Mexican aliens on relief rolls. Nor did this include
the additional costs of medical care, hospitalization, or other
forms of institutional care. The figures are from the County
Department of Public Assistance, Los Angeles.

There are other figures as well. Astonishing figures.
Figures which show that Mexican aliens constituted in
this one state more than 25 per cent of the SRA case load.
And yet they constituted less than 7 per cent of the entire
state's population. It all simmers down to the truism that
few Mexican aliens, if given forty or fifty dollars a month
by our government for doing nothing, can see any sense in
doing anything. And so they didn't other than breed. For
the more they bred, the more free money they got. Thus it
was that some of the Mexican alien families on relief had as
many as twelve children.

Don't ask me why we kept it up. I have no idea why. A
big percentage of these "unemployed" Mexican aliens had
been living in the United States as long as twenty-five years

THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL 2 03

and were still not citizens. Indeed, there were and
maybe still are more Mexicans living on relief in Cali-
fornia alone than there are Mexicans in the whole of Lower
California.

And I would need an opium dream to think of Mexico's
making a similar gesture to any Americans there, whether
in Lower California or on the mainland.

Even when indigent alien Mexican families in Los An-
geles County did volunteer to be repatriated back to their
home country, each was given a bonus of a hundred dollars
by the County to rehabilitate themselves after they crossed
the border. And, up to the time of this writing at least, that
system is still being followed.

According to the County's official report, "It is assumed
by county officials that had each case repatriated continued
on the County's relief rolls it would have cost the County
Government 19,443,000 to care for them.*'

We have, then, been generous to Mexicans. Generous
financially. But I can say, too, that the psychology of these
voluntary repatriated families is such that, instead of ap-
preciating it, they are the ones today who, when back in
Mexico, talk the most against Americans.

The psychological reason is, in part, that we have proved
ourselves foolish; therefore we must be fools. Another rea-
son is, that the heavier breeders among the Mexican fathers
now have to go to work again. That's a calamity. And for a
calamity it's always well to have somebody to blame. We're
to blame. In all of Lower California the one type of Mexi-
can I disliked to meet, or to have anything to do with, was
that Mexican who at sometime had made a career of living
on relief in the United States.

2O4 THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL

Our expensive handouts in the name of neighborly good
will, though noble in purpose, have completely backfired.
The project was aimed at the worst Mexicans, the laziest,
the dumbest, the most useless Mexicans in either country,
and not to the best Mexicans, the most valiant, the smartest,
the ones who have the fate of their own country at heart as
well as the fate of the whole continent.

The bookkeeping-ledger between our two countries
through the many years, containing as it does pluses and
minuses on each side, is indeed an odd one. Yet nevertheless
it is one to keep well in mind during the present crisis; espe-
cially when shouting too loudly about what we would like
to do or not in regard to Lower California. A Mexican in
his homeland, especially a proud Mexican officer in his
braided uniform, quite naturally resents Americans trying
to dictate to him. We should feel the same way about it if
the situation were reversed. A Mexican will listen to an
American officer, he will co-operate, but he does prefer to
know ahead of time that the situation is on an equal basis,
rank meeting rank, subordinates subject to superiors. And
that out of it all, such as in the case of Lower California, it's
still Mexico's land being defended.

Which, all in all, is exactly the way Lower California is
being guarded today. Nor, for the sake of full co-operation
between Mexican officers and American officers, should the
situation be otherwise unless one deliberately wishes to
invite a hell of a problem at a time when we cannot afford
to have another one on our hands. It is better to have the
Mexican Army working with us than resenting each ap-
pearance of each United States private or officer put on
the peninsula, scattered though these soldiers were immedi-

THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL 205

ately after Pearl Harbor along the more far-away strategical
points of the coastline.

Automatically as Americans we might assume, too, that
the more United States troops we sent into Lower Cali-
fornia to help the Mexicans watch their own coast, the hap-
pier the Mexicans would feel about it. But the sight of too
many United States' soldiers in Mexico does something to
the people there. They become wary. They become suspi-
cious. Nor is the reason hard to analyze. It can be traced to
distant history as well as to the more recent yesterday. The
Mexicans themselves, if you ask, will explain it.

The Mexicans have not forgotten Vera Cruz. Nor have
they forgotten our annexation of Texas. Nor our annexa-
tion of Upper California. Nor our sloppy handling of Lower
California during the time we actually did own it. Nor have
they forgotten General Taylor's March on Mexico City. Nor
have they forgotten a lot of other things as well things
which may seem of no consequence to us, but which do
have their own version in the Mexican schoolbooks of today.
One of Mexico's schoolbook classics of heroism, for in-
stance, is the time the young cadets at Chapultepec defended
themselves to the last boy against an ill-omened invasion of
American troops. The boys and girls of Mexico's schools are
raised on this story, and it means more to them, far more to
them, than the story of the Alamo means to our own school-
children. It means more because Mexico had more at stake.

"But it's all ancient history," we say today. "And times
have changed."

They have changed, all right, but not in La Paz, for ex-
ample. Not in that cobble-stoned little town, the isolated
capital of isolation.

2O6 THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL

For here in La Paz, too, is where that "gray-eyed man of
destiny," William Walker, landed with his band from San
Francisco to declare himself president of both Lower Cali-
fornia and of Sonora. Here it was that he hoisted his spe-
cially made flag containing two stars and three stripes. And
as proof that he was in earnest, he kidnaped the political
chief of the district, the bewildered Senor Robelledo, and
carried him as prisoner aboard the chartered brig Caroline.

We laugh about young Walker today. He was only twenty-
nine when he decided to annex Lower California to the
United States under the "Louisiana Code" meaning an-
other slave state for Jeff Davis. We laugh about him, and
to wash our hands of any responsibility concerning his antics
on the peninsula, we call him a filibuster. We consider him
not so much an audacious schemer as a clown.

But the Mexicans don't laugh about Walker. For it cost
their government eighty thousand pesos to combat him.
The United States paid back the sum, of course. But the
United States could not pay back all the official papers and
Mexican documents which Walker destroyed in the govern-
ment buildings in La Paz and San Jos< del Cabo. This care-
less destruction was one of Walker's biggest mistakes in win-
ning any popularity contest. And his only excuse was that
he had needed the paper for wrapping cartridges.

But other than that, for Walker did hold Lower Cali-
fornia, and other than his final fiasco in trying to cross from
Lower California to Sonora overland, Walker just barely
missed being remembered today in the same class with
Houston, Jed Smith, Bidwell, Pike, Austin, and Fremont
especially Fremont. For they, too, already had done much
the same thing as he tried to do. They had ventured across

THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL 207

Into foreign soil much on their own to prepare the way for
the United States to take over.

It was only about five years after the American flag had
been taken down in La Paz when Walker landed in the same
town quite easily with his forty-six men, his supplies and
ammunition, from the San Francisco brig Caroline.

Walker was not the only one in San Francisco who was
enthusiastic about the idea of acquiring Lower California.
He did not lack for recruits when he began recruiting his
"army" in San Francisco. The young recruits for the most
part were of Kentucky and Tennessee birth, to be sure. Yet
they paraded up and down the San Francisco streets, and
everybody was happy.

The one catch, if catch it could be called, did occur when
the "army" embarked aboard the chartered brig Arrow.
The brig was seized by General Hitchcock, then in com-
mand of the government troops in San Francisco. He tried
to put a stop to the whole thing, calling it an unfriendly
gesture toward a neutral nation. But for his thanks General
Hitchcock was removed from his command at San Francisco.

This removal indicates something, I should think;
namely, that there was another story back of the main story.
For Walker had no difficulty chartering another brig, the
Caroline. Nor when he sailed away this time for La Paz was
any attempt made to stop him.

The Mexicans of Lower California remember. For the
course taken by Walker through the peninsula is still there
as a daily reminder. He may have been a bold little man
(he stood scarcely more than five feet) but he also was an
educated man. He was a doctor, a lawyer, a newspaper edi-
tor. He was a misplaced freak. He could have been a hero.

208 THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL

but now he is remembered as a heel. A hero is somebody
who gets by with it; a filibuster is somebody who doesn't.

Yet for all of that, in the eyes of a great portion of the
United States, he was still being regarded as a hero when,
after having "captured" Lower California, he tried to take
Sonora on the mainland as well. It's one of the world's
hardest journeys, overland from San Vicente through the
Sierra San Pedro Martir, across the desert to the Colorado
River, then across the Colorado just to get to the mainland.
But Walker tried it with some of his men, and he failed. It
was the tough going that did it.

Finally he had to give up. The mountains, the desert, the
river all combined were too much for him. He returned to
the west coast of the peninsula, crossed the line at what
today is Tijuana, and surrendered to Captain Burton and
Major McKinstry, United States military officers at San
Diego.

Later in San Francisco, as we know, Walker and some of
his officers were tried on a charge of breaking the neutrality
laws of the United States. But nothing came of it. The men
were acquitted.

Mexico remembers that Walker and his men were ac-
quitted. And the quirk is that he has come to symbolize all
the other American filibusters in Lower California before
and after him.

In La Paz there also is the memory of Joseph C. More-
head, who as Quartermaster-General of California had pre-
ceded Walker by three years in landing with a party of some
two hundred men at La Paz from off the bark Josephine.
In equipping his outfit Morehead had found no trouble
utilizing the funds and supplies left over from the Yuma

THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL 209

campaign. But after arriving in La Paz the men seemed
to lose interest. They said they merely were coming for
trade. Maybe they were. Anyhow, the party broke up.

Yet at the same time another party, arranged by More-
head, was moving overland from Los Angeles to cross the
Gila River and reach the Sonora frontier on the mainland.
Some claim that Morehead had been invited by Mexico
to take a hand in controlling the Yaquis. I don't know any-
thing about that part of it, but I know it ended in con-
fusion.

But Morehead was not finished. He led a third detach-
ment out of San Diego by vessel for Mazatldn across from
La Paz. But at Mazatlan the Mexican authorities were ready
and waiting. They searched the vessel for arms and am-
munition. None was found. The would-be filibusters either
had thrown the stuff overboard on deciding not to be fili-
busters, or else there had been a mix-up in the arrange-
ments. Nothing happened. Some of the men stayed, and
some returned home again.

But the most recent filibustering expedition into Lower
California was in 19 1 1 . A great many of this party remained
in Lower California. They remained under the ground. The
affair was as bloody as it was involved.

This last filibustering expedition was so involved, in
fact, that there are still as many versions of it as there are
men who survived it. The people of today's Mexicali, Te-
cate, Tijuana, Ensenada, Santo Tomds, and even of San
Vicente slightly further south most of these old-timers
today have their own personal experiences of what hap-
pened to them during the wild affair.

For the battles ranged all the way from Mexicali to the

21O THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL

west coast of the peninsula, then back again to Mexicali,
the scene o the final annihilation of the filibusters.

Each ranch-owner has his own story to tell of what hap-
pened to him or to his belongings when one of the various
filibustering gangs descended upon his place to loot or to
burn or run off stock. And his version of the affair remains,
quite naturally, a strictly personal one.

Bert Moore, for instance, an American living in Lower
California at the time, still regrets the fine saddle he lost
to one of the filibuster-leaders, a "General" Mosby. Moore,
being a cowboy at heart, prized this saddle so much that his
version of the filibuster-campaign is likely, during a con-
versation, to be wrapped around this saddle.

When "General" Mosby, stricken with a bullet that
passed through his body from the back and out the shoul-
der, was convalescing in the San Diego jail, the saddle was
the reason Bert Moore visited the erstwhile "general" in
the jail.

Or if one asks Henry Fenton, the San Diego ranching
veteran, about the filibuster-campaign, he will remember
his grand stallion which was taken by this same "General"
Mosby and which he never recovered. Both Fenton and his
cowboy friend, Bert Moore, visited the wounded filibuster
leader in jail at the same time in hope of recovering the
lost goods. To these men, then, "General" Mosby represents
the leader incarnate.

But Mosby wasn't the only filibuster leader. There were
a lot of leaders, so many of them that they became entangled
within themselves, accounting in part for their ambitious
campaign blowing up so soon but not without first making
a mess of the border region.

THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL 211

According to one of the Mexican leaders, Jose Castro,
who came in with the crowd at Mexicali, the campaign was
even more ambitious than Walker's. According to Castro,
the plans were first to take Lower California, then move on
to take Sonora, parts of New Mexico and Arizona, and es-
tablish them all in a new republic.

The most amazing part about this pipe-dream is that it
did draw followers, anywhere from three hundred to four
hundred of them, mostly recruited on the United States
side of the border. The well-armed mob which entered
Lower California at Mexicali included get-rich-quick young
Americans, Negroes, and quite a few Mexicans themselves.
Castro had no Americans in his group, but only Mexicans,
when he moved all through the Alamo district, south of
Ensenada, and from there on south and west to the fight
at San Vicente.

Castro is the one, too, who talked the Arroyo Le6n In-
dians into joining the filibusters, who at the time called
themselves revolutionists. A few of the older Indians re-
fused to go into the movement and fled to the desert, from
which they did not return for two years, only to find that
the rest of the tribe had been wiped out, their houses
burned, their stock run off, and their fruit trees cut down.

It's not a pretty story. Nor, so far as the whole campaign
is concerned, is the massacre of the Indian village an im-
portant part of the story. But to posterity the massacre of
these Arroyo Le6n Indians is perhaps the biggest loss of
all. They had been, till this time, the one surviving Indian
village in the whole of the peninsula. The innocents among
them suffered as well the innocents who returned to their
village two years later to find it gone. The influenza epi-

212 THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL

demic a few years later almost did for all the rest.

The filibustering continued.

A "General" Berthold (or Bertholdt), a German, ap-
pears to have been the agreed leader of the party which
came in at Mexicali. For a time he maintained the semblance
of army efficiency as long as he was in command. But his
command ended when he was killed at Alamo. An Ameri-
can named "General" Stanley then tried to take over but
failed. His men broke up into small groups, without any
particular aim or leadership. One bunch did succeed in
camping in the Veladora, near the Valle del Maneadero,
ten miles from Ensenada, and this is the nearest that any
of the "revolutionists" got to the important town of En-
senada.

The more important town of Tijuana actually was held
by the filibusters for a time. It was held under the com-
mand of an American, a "General" Price. And the retaking
of Tijuana by General Vega, at that time Governor of the
Northern District of Lower California, is the battle which
the people of San Diego remember most vividly. For much
of the populace of San Diego rushed the eighteen miles to
the border to witness the battle.

As much as anything, this defeat of "General" Price by
General Vega, who had taken his soldiers up from Ensenada
to do the job, marked the swan song for the filibusters.

Other groups of them managed to straggle overland back
to Mexicali, the original entrance point. But here they
were overtaken by loyal Mexican volunteers and troops,
and the slaughter was repeated. A general burial grounds
near Mexicali holds their bodies today. The number buried
there varies in estimate anywhere from a hundred to two

THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL

hundred.

Everybody concerned, Mexicans and Americans alike,
who were living on the Mexican side of the border, have
their own stories to tell of what was done to their property
by the filibusters. I am especially indebted to the veteran
C. M. Carr family, of Rancho Los Sauces, for the most
thorough, rounded out details given me. And I am indebted
to a lot of others too.

If anyone Is inclined to think of these stories as good
fun, especially from the viewpoint of the Mexicans and
Americans living on ranches there, he has but to change
his mind by going into the Catholic church in Ensenada
today and viewing a memorial in the church itself.

The inscription, translated from the Spanish, reads: "In
memory of men who died in defense of their country."

The memorial is dated 1911, and lists forty-eight men,
half the names being marked as soldiers and the rest as
civilians.

It was the last attempt to take over Lower California
from Mexico. And even if the "insurgents" did Include
Mexicans as well as an assortment of other nationalities,
still the attempt unfortunately was originated on the sly
by some smarties on our side of the border.

So Lower California remembers. Ensenada remembers.
La Paz, way down near the southern tip, remembers.

All of which makes it just as well, perhaps, not to keep
talking about what we would do with Lower California if
only WE had it especially when we had a few of our own
troops down there recently helping the Mexican soldiers
guard their own coast against surprise.

CHAPTER 21

THE STORY of Lower California could have been told
chronologically, I presume, with specific dates and names.
But I have yet to learn the feel of any country, even my
own, through the arithmetical process of remembering
dates, or even by tabulating them. Countries are like our
own lives in this respect, I think. Few of us, with the pos-
sible exception of conversational bores, remember our own
pasts through a procession of calendar calculations. Nor
can we, for the life of us, precisely say to the day or the
hour or the month when changes took place within us.
We can guess roughly, perhaps, or we can pretend boldly
to know. Yet within our hearts we are aware that the in-
fluences which brought our own changes were microscopic
at first, and hardly recognizable as changes at all.

This was specifically true with Lower California. It is
still so true with Lower California that, though I have a
feeling this big country, asleep these many years, has just
finished a long era and may be bound for a new turnover
still I am not sure of it. But if it is so, I am lucky to have
had my journey in Lower California just before the dead-
line of this new change. Otherwise I should not have been
in a position to have seen this land still as bleak in many
places as when Ximenez first landed on it in 1533. Or when
Father Kino, accompanied by a Spanish admiral and much
soldiery, tried colonizing the peninsula in 168384 and
failed. Or when Father Salvatierra actually accomplished

214

THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL 21 5

the trick some thirteen years later, with only six soldiers.

One of these soldiers, Manuel de Osio (sometimes spelled
Ocio), established the first business dynasty in Lower Cali-
fornia, the reverberations of his keenness being still much
in evidence. He started the first silver mine near San An-
tonio, which is in the region of the now-famed silver mines
of Triunfo. I use the word "famous" only in the sense that
there is a has-been fame about them. Today Triunfo is a
ghost-town not at all unlike our own ghost-towns of Cali-
fornia and Nevada.

When I saw Triunfo on my way to the Cape, on the
road from La Paz to San Jos6 del Cabo, I could easily imagine
I was seeing Virginia City. The silent town of Triunfo was
dominated by its mountains of slag-heaps, its abandoned
buildings, its rusted machinery. The whole town too, like
Virginia City, was teetering above its undermined founda-
tions. One can feel sorry today for Triunfo, the most lavish
attempt ever made in Lower California to mine silver on
a tremendous scale. But when the ore petered out, the town
petered out with it. Even the slag-heaps have been worked
over again.

For all of that Triunfo has yielded its millions, and lost
its millions, and it all dates back to the former soldier with
the Jesuits who tried the region first. Nor did the soldier
get his financial start with silver. He got it with pearls
the very pearls which the Jesuits refused to handle. And
this is what I mean by the various interlapping incidents
which have caused the story of Lower California to take so
many threads, none of which can be followed consecutively
and still be called the whole.

It was a storm in 1740 which gave the soldier Manuel de

2l6 THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL

Osio his pearls. The waves of this storm threw so many pearl
oysters ashore upon a distant beach that the pearls literally
lay there in plain sight for the picking, most of the shells
already cracked open by the buffeting, Indians from the
vicinity of San Ignacio Mission were the first to spot the
pearls. Though the Indians as a rule had no use themselves
for pearls, not even for their own personal decoration, still
they had learned that a handful of pearls could be traded
for a knife.

So the Indians approached the soldier Manuel de Osio.
Seeing the pounds and pounds of pearls no doubt he must
have thought he was dreaming things. But he didn't dream
for long. He promptly asked for his discharge as a soldier.
The discharge was granted. He then obtained from the
Indians the total mass of the windfall. Father Clavigero
reports that the total mass amounted to 177 Spanish pounds
in weight. The former soldier became the richest man in
Lower California.

Osio went to the mainland of Sinaloa with his wealth,
and there he used part of his money to outfit himself with
boats, supplies, divers. With them he returned to Lower
California and went in for pearl-fishing in earnest. Two
years after his first windfall he fell into another one which
netted him, in the year 1742, almost as many pearls as the
first time. But the subsequent years, or rather the year of
1744, was qruly the all-time record-breaker for any single
pearler in Lower California before or since. The weight of
his pearls in 1744 amounted to 275 pounds.

But this former soldier was at heart a plunger. Follow-
ing some lean years with pearling, he next turned to mining,
and didn't do so well.

THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL 217

We might wonder why Salvatierra and his Jesuits, being
practical padres, had refused the pearls or had not gone
in for pearling like the Dominicans afterward. But Salva-
tierra had a reason for it. He wanted to stay aloof from the
commercial crowd who, because they put pearls first, had
failed so miserably in trying to colonize Lower California
ahead of him.

Yet Salvatierra's success had a reaction. The same type
of people who had been unable to build a foothold in
Lower California now moved in there to cash in on what
he had done. And, being Spanish and Mexican, the first
thing these commercial-minded people wanted to do was
have Salvatierra kicked out. He interfered, they said, with
their handling of the Indians for free labor and free diving.

Nor are the circumstances which handicapped Salvatierra
in his time much different in spirit from the circumstances
which have prevailed in Lower California since his time,
including today. In Lower California the agrarians have
not developed new lands, or orchards, or watering systems.
But they are the first to try to move into any ranch which
other folks have developed through the years, and they
are the first to wreck the ranch if possible through ignorance,
laziness, and indifference. I know one case on a formerly
beautiful ranch south of Ensenada where the agrarians,
in their stupidity, plowed right over twenty of the ranch's
expensive irrigation wells, ruining them, although each well
had cost the original owners five hundred dollars.

All of which, too, is another reason why Lower California
is as it is. One political regime will welcome development
and the private money necessary for capital. But the next
will do its best to have the whole works taken back again,

2l8 THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL

and distributed to God knows whom or what. It's an old
story, and it's older even than Salvatierra's own experiences
with it.

The King naturally listened to the pearlers' complaints
about Salvatierra and agreed with them. It was easy for the
King to agree, inasmuch as he automatically had appointed
himself the personal recipient of one-fifth of all the pearls
gathered.

But the Jesuit Order, backed by its own Pious Fund, was
still strong both in Europe and America. The Order was
backed financially by a lot of old repentant sinners, includ-
ing members of royalty, who on their deathbeds suddenly
decided to reserve rooms for themselves in heaven by sub-
scribing to this Pious Fund.

Though the complaints about Salvatierra's refusal to co-
operate with the pearlers did not land on deaf ears, still
there was nothing for the moment the King could do. He
appointed a new soldier-captain, Antonio Garcia de Men-
doza, to replace the faithful old soldier-captain who had
been with Salvatierra all through the trials of settling Lower
California. And this new captain immediately went in for
pearling in a big way. Not only that, but to protect his own
personal operations, he assumed the Nazi psychology of
accusing Salvatierra of being the pearler.

But as usual in such cases the world over, it was the
native Indians who paid the penalty. Their numbers were
cut more than half by forced diving and forced labor, and by
the diseases imported from Europe by the pearlers. Syphilis
and gonorrhea predominated in each village, and smallpox
epidemics became annual occurrences. Nowhere in either
North America or Central America or South America has

THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL

there been such a complete wipe-out of aborigines as oc-
curred in Lower California. Nor did the decline take long.
It was furious in its rapidity even during the time of the
Jesuits. Each year's census around the missions showed
fewer and fewer, and then suddenly a lot fewer.

Also, the whole desert equation in that harsh land of
breeding-when-you-felt-like-it, and with-whom-you-felt-
like-it, became so upset that mostly boy babies alone were
being born. Don't ask me why. I don't know. But as time
went along and the babies grew into people, there were
four times as many men Indians as women, and the mis-
sionaries became desperate for want of an annual crop of
souls to save.

The Pericues tribe around Loreto was the most noticeable
in this respect. It virtually became a tribe of men only.
The easiest way out for the missionaries was to appeal
to the wilder tribes among the mountains to send their
daughters to the Mission of Loreto to become not only
Christians but also brides. But the Pericues were not a
popular tribe with any of the other tribes, and so the old
men of the mountains merely laughed at the idea.

The missionaries then sent a vessel over to the Yaqui
country of Sonora to have the vessel loaded with Yaqui
girls. The brother Jesuits on the other side of the Gulf
were expected to help out on this, as there must be Yaqui
girls to spare in the Missions over there. But the vessel
returned to Loreto empty of all save the crew. The Yaqui
girls, when the proposition was put up to them, would
have nothing to do with a Lower California Indian, and
their parents backed them up.

It happened that another customary war was under way

22O THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL

at the time between the governor of the province of Sinaloa-
Sonora and the Indians of Tiburon Island. The girls of
Tiburon might be the answer. But in those days the Seri
were mighty men, indeed, and great desert-runners. And
the latter characteristic also was inherited by the Seri girls
as well, judging from the written report of the Jesuit Clavi-
gero:

By means of the same missionaries Salvatierra asked the
governor of that province (since he was waging war on the
Seri) to send the young women of that nation whom he
might capture to California in order to marry them to the
Pericues. The governor agreed to it, but he did not succeed
in capturing any.

So Loreto, once known as the magnificent capital of both
the Californias, on the Gulf side of the peninsula, has gone
down and down in its seedy march until even the few people
there seem but slightly aware of the great part Loreto once
played as the beginning and the end of the Jesuits.

Even the sign today which points to the side road leading
to Loreto is printed as if some child had printed it. Pointing
in the general direction of the Gulf from off the Camino
Real, it is scribbled on a piece of box-board not far from
Comondu. The letters are all in lower case loreto.

Yet it was here where Salvatierra, after landing with his
small party to establish the first mission in either of the
Californias, was greeted by the Indians with a shower of
arrows. It was here, too, where through courage alone he
changed the Indians from enemies into friends through the
simple diplomacy of not murdering them.

THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL 221

But even today there continues an everlasting argument
over the location of this first mission site near Loreto. The
arguments are shadowed a little, I think, by the ancient
story of how the exact site of Loreto itself came to be
selected. The padres, laden with their equipment, were
on their way to another spot selected for the mission when
the mule, bearing on its back the image of the Virgin, fell
and would not rise. This was assumed to be a miracle, in-
dicating the Virgin's own desire to remain where her image
fell. The first mission accordingly was built on that spot.

Before the capital was changed from Loreto to La Paz,
Loreto time and again was looted by corsairs, especially by
the Dutch, who at that time were called Pichilingues
the name given to the inner harbor within the harbor of
La Paz.

So it is all still woven together, then, the past as well as
the present, and all of it still visible after a fashion. The
past has not altogether departed to give way to the new.

During the Jesuits' seventy years in Lower California,
they not only founded twenty-three missions, of which
fourteen were successes, but beginning with Loreto they
scientifically explored and charted much of the whole coun-
try, including the waters of the Gulf. Their reports on the
fauna and flora of the country are serviceable even to this
day. They planted the date palms which even now are the
main support of such Lower California towns as Comondu,
Mulege, and San Ignacio. The Jesuits started the vineyards
and thoroughly classified what native plants could be eaten
and which ones were poisonous.

When Father Serra, the Franciscan, landed at Loreto

222 THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL

to begin his march to the harbor of San Diego, Loreto al-
ready had most of the conveniences of a European town.

But by this time Salvatierra, the Jesuit ground-breaker,
had died. His death spared him the spectacle of the half-
witted orders of that half-witted Spanish King, Charles III.

These orders, dispatched in a sealed envelope to the
viceroy of Mexico, read:

I invest you with my whole authority and royal power
that you shall forthwith repair with an armed force to the
houses of the Jesuits. You will seize the persons of all of
them and despatch them within twenty-four hours as prison-
ers to the port of Vera Cruz, where they will be embarked
on vessels provided for that purpose. At the very moment
of such arrest you will cause to be sealed the records of said
houses, and the papers of such persons, without allowing
them to remove anything but their prayer-books and such
garments as are absolutely necessary for the journey. If after
the embarkation there should be found in that district a
single Jesuit, even if ill or dying, you shall suffer the penalty
of death.

There were sixteen Jesuits on the peninsula when these
orders came through by way of Loreto. There was nothing
for them to do, of course, except obey the orders immedi-
ately. It was their thanks. So, taking only their prayer-books
and breviaries, they tramped from their respective missions
to Loreto. From here they crossed the Gulf as prisoners to
San Bias, to begin the Sso-mile tramp overland as prisoners
to Vera Cruz. Several of them died en route, and only two
of them survived their harsh treatment long enough to see
Spain.

THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL 223

So it was this same little town which had seen their begin-
ning in Lower California as well as their farewell.

But still in Loreto today we yawn and wish there was
something of ' 'importance around here/* The village con-
tinues dreaming under the Gulf sun.

CHAPTER 22

ALL TOWNS look different when you are about to leave
them, and after you realize you have made friends. I can
say this about La Paz. But it took the dengue fever, and
several days in bed, to make me a little ashamed of some
of the previous thoughts I had held about La Paz during
those days of first arrival.

A Mexican army doctor treated me for my dengue. But
when I wanted to pay him he would accept nothing. We
can't easily forget gestures like that. He had been a stranger
to me all through, and I had done nothing for him. But,
then, I had done nothing out-of-the-way to invite the den-
gue, either. It simply had come as a gift from some desert
mosquito.

The Mexicans have several names for the dengue, but
all the names more or less cover the same thing. One of the
Mexican names, trancaso when translated, means: "hit-on-
the-back-of-the-head-with-a-club." This is fairly descriptive,
though not altogether accurate. A hazy feeling comes first,
as if you are struggling to walk on a cloud. Your feet will
not behave, and then comes the knock from behind. All
fight wilts after that. You drop upon the nearest bed and
have dreams of being in a nether-land. The only thing
earthy about you, to keep you periodically conscious, is
your skin. It hurts all over, but especially where it touches
the bed or bedding. Funny little red spots break out on
your feet, too. I looked at mine and thought they must

THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL 225

be the marks of some cactus I had forgotten.

The Mexican doctor looked and said: "Dengue." Good,
then it did have a name. And the name wasn't leprosy. He
put a thermometer under my arm. We waited. He took
the thermometer out again, examined it, and gave me the
score in centigrade which I do not understand. But he
sent somebody out for a bottle of pills, a mixture of qui-
nine and something else.

The desert mosquito which gives dengue is hardly larger
than a gnat, and lays its eggs, not in stagnant water, but in
clean water. But while the doctor was explaining this to
me, I didn't especially care. I was too sleepy and had a
dizzy head. Yet the point of all this is not the boring details
of the sickness itself, or of the lavish sweats accompanying
it. The point is how erstwhile acquaintances, and even
strangers, there in La Paz assumed control of things and
of me. There had been no need for them to do so. I had
not gone head-over-heels in compliments about their town.

Yet Jaime, the Spanish bartender of the Hotel Perla,
miraculously kept me provided with lime juice when I knew
how scarce limes were in La Paz at the time. Phone mes-
sages were relayed to me too, during waking hours, from
persons I had assumed to be mere acquaintances. All in
all, my session with the dengue proved to be more of a
clearing-house to the report I was preparing than a handi-
cap. I couldn't write, my hand was too shaky, but at least
I could think and mostly of the little things I had left
unrecorded. Little things which are necessary to balance
the whole picture. It would be unfair, for instance, to leave
the impression that the Mexicans of Lower California spend
all their time drinking. I may have given the impression

226 THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL

because, In my contact with them, a glass was the most
hospitable way I could find to break through their reserve.
Likewise a fiesta is a time for drinking, and I have described
a fiesta. But a fiesta is something they save for. In between
times the isolated families may not see a bottle. It's a luxury.
It's quite true, too, that the ordinary Mexican families
rarely keep liquor in their homes.

Lying there with the dengue, and quite helpless to do
anything about it, I also recalled a pageant of little incidents
which, though not important in themselves, seem to share
tiny threads in the bigger pattern of Lower California. What
about the American beachcomber whose hut was on the
scorching sands of San Ignacio Lagoon? Yes, what about
him? And would our entrance into the war mean anything
to him? He was living with a Mexican woman and had
five or six children, all naked. The youngest was sick. The
father and he did have all the earmarks of a one-time
educated man blamed the child's sickness onto a change
of diet. The child's food, out of momentary necessity, had
been changed from turtles to turtle-eggs.

Living on the outskirts of La Paz itself was a bearded
American whose story I would like to have known. But as
he did not volunteer it, despite the many conversations we
had, I could not muster the nerve to ask him. Nor would
I care to give his name, even the Mexican version of it,
for he told me he had relatives living in Upper California.
His whole ambition seemed to be how dirty he could keep
his body. His skin actually carried scales of dirt day after
day, week after week. He never bathed, and yet strangely I

THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL 227

liked him. Working for Mexicans in what is known as a
"pepper tree garage" meaning the garage in a Mexican
back yard he was a mechanic extraordinary. I visited him
each day while he was taking a friend's car apart and putting
it together again.

His educated voice was as soft as his blue eyes. He had
been living in Lower California more than twenty-five
years, but he would not tell me why he did not care to
return to the States again. He would talk about everything
else but that. His clothes were so ragged, so shredded, that
they revealed the skinny bone-knots of his frail body. Part
of his skinniness was due to the bite of a dog. The dog
had bitten him badly, and he had almost bled to death
before being rescued.

While weak with my own dengue I could not help but
think of his weakness. But he was determined to show us,
as Americans, that he could put the motor all together
again, each item of it. He would not let any of the Mexicans
help him. He said: "They haven't the touch like we have."

In La Paz, when we played poker Mexican-style, the deal-
ing was performed from left to right, and not clockwise.
Once when we were playing poker a Mexican with the
customary sad eyes said for no apparent reason: "The other
revolution was so much fun. When are we ever going to
have another?"

In a shack eight or nine miles south of La Paz lives the
boy prodigy, Adolfo Savin. I first read about him in the
Los Angeles Times (July 13, 1941) on his one trip to the
United States.

228 THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS 1STILL

But the stories about the nine-year-old boy were so much
more amazing in La Paz, where he was born, than they
were in the published story that I went out to visit him.
Although he has had only six months of schooling he is a
mathematical wonder, to be sure. He does all his adding
and subtracting in his head, never using a paper. This way
he can handle figures o more than a million. He proved
this to me while I in turn used a paper and pencil.

But the people of La Paz, not content with the proven
facts, have built a legend around the boy. They say that
when Adolfo was only three months old he suddenly stopped
nursing at his mother's breast one evening to say to her in
perfect Spanish: "Look up the road, mother. Here come
my brothers and sisters with a fish."

They say, too, that when Adolfo was only five years old
he could talk perfect French, although nobody around him
had ever spoken it. When I asked if he could speak French
now, the answer was: "No, he's forgotten it."

But the many legends, supernatural and otherwise, about
the boy are not his fault. He seemed unmindful of all of
them as he stood there in his yard, which contained a goat,
dogs, cats, torn-up cactus, and a windmill. He wore a pair
of green homemade pants, and he nervously twirled a toy
propeller while performing his swift calculations.

His eyes were soft and strange, and he was such a little
genius that I felt sorry for him. Nor would he get to spend
the pesos I handed him when departing. They no doubt
would go to the relatives with whom he was living. For
Adolfo today is an orphan, and with no school anywhere
near by.

PART OF THE NATIONAL HIGHWAY

MAX MILLER AND THE YOUNG MATHEMATICAL GENIUS

THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL

The American prospector, the one who was born on the
Mexican mainland, continued trying to improve my Span-
ish while I had the fever. There was nothing much else to
do. "Keep in mind," he once said, "that Spanish frequently
is expressed backward like this: 'Throw the horse over
the fence some hay/ "

I don't recommend the phrase to a fever-patient. He
can't get rid of the phrase. It will stay with him all night in
his delirium.

A refrain which I could not dismiss from my mind was
how Lower California, since first touched by Europeans
four centuries ago, has had no real winners. There have
been a few personal ones who temporarily have won for
themselves, but the peninsula itself has had no winning
champion no hero for the peninsula's own sake.

The more I thought about this, while sweating there in
bed, the more the thought seemed to be the key to why
Lower California has remained so unknown, so unde-
veloped. It lacks a Big Name in history to personify the
land.

Something always has happened to any group, or any
people, who tried to 'bring Lower California to the fore-
front. The Indians, who did know how to make use of the
country in their crude way, were slaughtered. The Jesuits,
who came to save the souls of the Indians, were in turn
arrested. But the Jesuits did manage to make the first settle-
ments, and to develope the first gardens, after the Spanish
soldiers had failed to get anywhere. The Franciscans, who
came to supplant the Jesuits, became discouraged with the

23O THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL

whole idea of Lower California. Too much Spanish politics.
Taking what they needed of the Jesuits' supplies, the Fran-
ciscans moved northward to open Upper California. The
Dominicans, who came to carry on for the Franciscans, were
carried away instead, finally, by an urge for pearls and
women. They turned mortal even as you and I.

So nobody has triumphed over Lower California, al-
though there are some Mexicans (a very few) who are mak-
ing a fairly nice living out of it for themselves. But through
it all the interior wilderness still remains much the same
old wilderness, the whole approximately 128,150 square
miles of it. And the principal industry is babies.

Or, as the father of a big family explained it when I
asked him why he had so many children: "Well, you see,
mister, out where we lives as soon as it gets dark it gets
very dark. We can't afford candles, so we have to go right
to bed. It is then, mister, that the coyotes keep us awake."

Those coyotes! They comprise the national anthem of
Lower California. I rather missed hearing them while con-
fined to my room in La Paz. During the night in the open
beneath a big desert sky there will be no man-made lights
anywhere, no lights from huts or villages. There is instead
only the night talk of the wild animals the night talk of
birds, of coyotes, and of an occasional lion crying down
from the hills. The first grayness of morning will reveal,
too, not the silhouettes of roofs, but the silhouettes of
strange cactus-trees, immense things and beautiful in their
simple architecture.

But among the questions I most surely would be asked
on my return would be: "You must have had a grand time.

THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL

Did you enjoy yourself?" To this there is no answer, either
yes or no. I always have regarded as a cardinal injustice to
mankind the type of reports which indirectly urge others
to go and do likewise over the same land by promising too
much in the way of sights to see, people to meet. But this
difficulty has solved itself now, of course, because of tires,
because of gasoline, because of the war.

Also, to keep the record clear, I must add that this dengue
was the most humiliating thing, the most inconvenient
thing, which occurred to me on the whole journey. I faced
no danger, nor do I think the naturalists faced any, al-
though one of them apparently thrived on handling rattle-
snakes.

So careful was he not to mar their skins or their skulls that
he would kill his rattlesnake specimens gently by forcing
them with his hands headfirst and cautiously into a bottle
of alcohol. With his bare hands he would pick up live
tarantulas, too, and crowd them the same way down into
his assorted collector's bottles. I would call that danger
but he didn't

There were a few days of convalescence from the weaken-
ing dengue, before I was able to see, from my hotel win-
dows, the little vessel Araguan corning into La Paz from
the mainland.

The arrival of the small mail-packet meant Mail Day to
La Paz. It meant, too, that the cobbled little town, desper-
ately anxious to appear busy again, if merely for a day,
would assume a serious mien of importance by practically
doing nothing.

"I can't see you today, you know. It's Mail Day. But how

232 THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL

about tomorrow?" Or: "Sorry, we'll have to put that con-
ference off till another time. I'd forgotten today was to be
Mail Day/'

But whatever the odds, La Paz does deserve its Mail Days.
There would be letters, too. And there would be papers.
It was always surprising what consternation of self-impor-
tance a few letters could cause in the hands of these for-
gotten people. They would become bright-eyed, mysterious,
important. They would become people of the world again.

Now that my own work was done, my report completed,
I decided to ship aboard the little mail-packet across the
Gulf to Topolobampo on the mainland, then return to
the United States that way. It would save time. It also
would save the repetition of bumping back along the same
Camino Real again through the same villages and the same
deserts.

I say that my report was completed. Yet this is hardly
the truth. I realized this fully when out in the Gulf aboard
the little Araguan, I looked back upon the gray silhouette
which was the backbone of the long length of the lonely
land.

How, I wondered, could I put everything in the report?
All of the things both big and little which I knew about?
How, I wondered, and still keep the report balanced?

The northern region, the region which my years around
San Diego have made me the most familiar with, I have
not played up at all. The very familiarity, I suppose, has
ruined the news-value in it for me.

The famed Russian Village of Guadalupe, for instance,
I've skipped altogether. Yet strangers will often make this
their first question about Lower California. But the various

THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL 233

newspaper feature-stories written about this Russian Vil-
lage (Lord, I've written them myself) have given the place
more picturesqueness than it now deserves. Then, too, the
Village can be reached out of San Diego in two or three
hours, depending on the condition of the side road leading
to the Village from off the main paved highway to En-
senada.

But the Russian Village of Guadalupe no longer is what
it used to be when it contained 108 Russian families, and
when most of the members still wore the original costumes
of Russia. Even the horses worked with those high Russian
yokes.

There still remain a few of the die-hard old Russian
patriarchs who arrived there in the beginning, 1906. These
old patriarchs to this day speak only their original Russian,
knowing neither Spanish nor English. They continue strong
on religion too, the same odd religion which caused them
to move out of Russia for more freedom. And, following
the advice of a prophet, the colonists landed first in San
Francisco and then moved into Lower California to pur-
chase from the Mexican Government the land grant for
establishing their fields and their village.

But the biggest change has been for the children and the
children's children, especially the girls. The majority have
moved back into the United States. I last visited the Rus-
sian Village of Guadalupe in 1941, and what I remember
most is one of the old men taking me into his hut to show
me a goo-year-old Bible, and the book of a Russian child
prophet, now dead.

And I remember, too, the tranquillity of the village's
main road, with geese still idling back and forth across it;

234 THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL

and the tall shade- trees (planted by the Russians). I re-
member the bareness of the rooms, no carpets, few decora-
tions, homemade benches for chairs and the women doing
needlework. When we were out on the side of the road
again, I asked where the store was, that I might buy some
candy for the Russian boys, and I was told that I was lean-
ing against the store. Which I was, for the store was no
more than a big box.

In comparison with the whole of Lower California, the
Russian Village has become insignificant indeed.

I should have dwelt more on the wildness of the Sierra
San Pedro Martir, the last vestige, in these days, of every-
thing which used to represent both Californias. The giant
California condor, the bird with the broadest wing-spread
in all the world (surpassing even the South American con-
dor), can still be found in the Sierra San Pedro Martir. In
Upper California, though, this mighty bird, once so nu-
merous, is virtually extinct today, except for a lingering
colony in a Federal condor sanctuary within the Los Padres
National Forest behind Santa Barbara. But other than
those few there are no giant California condors left except
in Lower California in the San Pedro Martir. And even
their number there is visibly on the decrease.

The Sierra San Pedro Martir, so comparatively close to
the northern border, includes everything from forests to
waterfalls, and is a terrific contrast to the cactus drylands
comprising the brunt of the whole peninsula further south.
Though bighorn are in the San Pedro Martir, bear for
some reason have seldom been seen, if at all, in Lower
California.

So, as the little Araguan, with her rusty sides, was taking

THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL 2 5

me further and further away from the shadowy line which
was the peninsula, I, too, was having the La Paz Mail Day
jitters. I, too, was starting to become oppressed with the
awfulness of making decisions. Nor, like La Paz, did I see
much sense in having to suffer all my Mail Day decisions
in silence. But it was a case of have-to. Out there on the
Gulf I was on my own.

Once back in the United States the foremost question
which asked me would be, I knew, the proverbial one:
"How about Jap secret airbases in Lower California?" I
would have to have an answer for it.

The only honest answer possible for me to give is that I
saw none, heard of none. Nor by airbases do I mean land-
ing fields. Of possible landing fields (in the dry season) there
are plenty. But then what? Airbases are something else
again. They require stored oil brought in by some miracle
and in secret.

Each day Lower California is being patrolled from the
air by Mexican and American planes. And the openness of
the desert country is such that almost any movement on
the ground can be seen from above. There are no conceal-
ing forests along the waterline of Lower California. There
is only the low brush of the mesquite, the chaparral, or else
the blunt open sand. Most of the Japanese in Lower Cali-
fornia already have been moved away, mostly to the main-
land. If any do remain at the time of this writing, they are
being watched as closely as in Upper California itself. But
it was not always thus in Lower California any more than in
Upper California.

Since today's world is one in which anything can happen,
and usually the impossible first of all, a reporter can make

2 $6 THE LAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL

a fool o himself very easily by being too definite about
what an enemy can or cannot do.

Yet, knowing the hard, waterless condition of that land
down there (all drinking water would have to be imported
by the invaders. Nor would any towns along the Pacific,
other than Ensenada, be big enough to offer even an hour's
supplies to a single company) knowing all this, I feel that
whatever the enemy may do from the south would have to
be done through sneak aircraft-carriers. And the same thing
could happen just as logically off the shore of Upper Cali-
fornia itself.

This is the end of my report on Lower California. For
the little Araguan, after having chugged along all night
across the Gulf, was finally far and away from the peninsula's
shadowy outline. Nor would it be until I was back in San
Diego, the loop completed, that I would be seeing Lower
California again. I would be back at the starting place. And
over there across the border I would be seeing once more
the first of those same lonely hills which for twenty years
had been tempting me.

THE END

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